To best understand the impact and influence of Beach House in the 2010s, do not read the rave reviews or scour the year-end and decade lists. Yes, Bloom and Depression Cherry debuted in the Billboard top ten, amidst a brief period when rappers were sampling Beach House more often than James Brown. Put all that aside. Rather, we need to consider a Beach House song that wasn’t actually written by Beach House.
In 2012, Volkswagen really, really wanted to capture that Beach House essence to sell the Polo, a hatchback only available in the European market. Specifically, “Take Care,” the swooning, sweeping power ballad that closes Beach House’s breakthrough 2010 record Teen Dream. They reportedly asked Victoria Legrand and Alex Scally a half dozen times and were turned down an equal amount. Beach House was not above licensing their music, as they’d given Guinness and New Girl the green light in recent years. Maybe it was the pitch, maybe the company rubbed them the wrong way, but in the end, Volkswagen got their bespoke “Take Care” in the form of “Whispers & Stories,” the creation of a UK “music sound and design firm” called Sniffy Dog.
There was really nothing Beach House could do from a legal standpoint, due to the fuzzy nature of copyright law pre-“Blurred Lines” and the financial barrier to suing an international car company. Besides, if Beach House wanted to lawyer up every time they got ripped off in the past 20 years, it would be like an inverse class action lawsuit, one party taking on thousands upon thousands for harms rendered.
I don’t think “Zebra” or “Space Song” will be used in millennial period films like “Fortunate Son,” a signifier of all of the cultural turbulence that took place in the 2010s. But they do serve as a shorthand for a number of overlapping shifts in both sounds and sentiments throughout the decade that elevated a certain palette of vibes — the gauzier side of Fleetwood Mac, the poppier moments of Cocteau Twins, all things “Lynchian.” They weren’t chillwave, but they were called Beach House, hence why they were a seamless fit within the “cloud rap” nebula.
Some album rankings lists are fun because they require the writer to compare disparate parts, to reckon with whether, say, The Cure’s forbidding goth masterpiece is a greater success than their pure pop album, or if Bright Eyes’ traditionalist folk record truly supersedes their monomaniacal orchestral emo. This one compelled me for the exact opposite reason — perhaps even more so than Spoon, Beach House is the band most often described as “consistent,” to a fault. I imagine someone who hears them as strictly a “vibes” band that this is akin to doing an AC/DC album ranking list.
Philip Sherburne astutely described Beach House as a Ship Of Theseus in his Pitchfork review of 2022’s Once Twice Melody, but in running through the catalog in chronological order, their sound seemed more like a cruise ship — incapable of sudden, sharp turns, but the slightest, subtle shift in coordinates sets them on a path that doesn’t become clear until much later. Beach House has always made “Beach House Music” from the start, but the trek from “Saltwater” to “Modern Love Stories” covers all seasons, all phases of love and, yes, all vibes.
With the 10th anniversary of Depression Cherry, the source of their biggest hit, here’s one man’s opinions on Beach House albums, from least best to most best.
8. Thank Your Lucky Stars (2015)
Here’s my tip for aspiring music writers: Unless an artist explicitly tells you about their motivations for a given record, don’t act like you know what they are. That’s something I had to learn the hard way over the past couple of decades. No matter how much time I spend poring over a band’s press materials, interviews, lyrics, and everything else that exists as explainers for their actual music, you cannot read their mind. You will write many reviews that either praise or malign an artist for meeting the goals that you set for them and perhaps find out you had it all wrong.
This is all prelude to me listening to Thank Your Lucky Stars intermittently over the past decade without reading too much about it and thinking it was meant as a clearinghouse for songs that couldn’t quite make the cut on Depression Cherry but were too good for the trash bin. Or, that it was their Amnesiac, a batch of songs cut from a long stretch of creativity that became its own thing. Or, possibly contractual obligation. No, it was none of that. Here is Victoria Legrand on Thank Your Lucky Stars — “Thematically, this album often feels political.” Next time I go to a Beach House show, I would like to present a survey to the likely 2,000-or-so people in attendance and ask them what comes to mind thematically when they think of Thank Your Lucky Stars. How many would say “political”?
But low-key… I think my interpretation feels more correct, as Thank Your Lucky Stars is a solid slate of Beach House songs that kinda knows it can’t compete with Bloom and so it didn’t. Had it been released, say, in late 2016 rather than two months after Depression Cherry, would “Majorette” or “Rough Song” be appreciated as low-key gems or heard as undercooked? Would it be seen as Beach House repeating themselves, or did its proximity to Depression Cherry allow it to be seen as proof of a band on a hot streak? As an added bonus, maybe if Depression Cherry felt like a step back after its two mammoth predecessors, it’s not a reach to think that Thank Your Lucky Stars is a band getting in touch with its roots, which might not be the worst thing after the past five years of overexposure!
But something has to be in this spot, if only because Thank Your Lucky Stars just makes me think of what an explicitly political Beach House album would really sound like.
7. Once Twice Melody (2022)
Beach House had already proven they could make a double album’s worth of music by releasing Depression Cherry and Thank Your Lucky Stars within the span of two months. But could they make a double album? When you hear “double album,” your mind probably goes to Sign O’ The Times; Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness; Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming; The White Album; Life After Death; Physical Graffitti; Wu-Tang Forever; The Wall; MP Da Last Don — ambitious, decadent, and almost always fascinatingly flawed documents of musicians convinced (rightfully or otherwise) that they’re at the peak of their own powers. They’re often known for their hits and defined by the experiments, the duds and even — gasp — the filler.
Up until this point, Beach House’s catalog may not have been perfect, but it was pretty much flawless, without a single song that tried for something that proved to be beyond their reach. And so while Beach House might have been the last band you’d expect to make a double album, maybe they’re a band that needed to, if only to prove that they hadn’t perfected their craft. Yet, Once Twice Melody sidesteps the expectations of a double album and not just because they released it in “four chapters,” which is still how it’s formatted on streaming services.
Legrand and Scally didn’t explode the boundaries of what “Beach House” meant, but allowed them to logically extend into areas adjacent to their core sound. Beach House fans likely already appreciate the dreamier side of Broadcast, so there’s the title track. There’s the acoustic sunrise and nocturnal synth-pop, Moroder and motorik, millennial indie-pop not that far off from the Lana Del Rey or M83 songs that share space with Beach House on countless Spotify playlists. There’s no “We Only Come Out At Night,” no “Why Don’t We Do It In The Road,” no songs about magic frogs sung by magic children, nothing that immediately courts ridicule or passionate, contrarian defense. It’s another excellent Beach House album that’s twice as long as their other excellent albums and yet disappoints ever so slightly for not being a double album — better than I remember whenever I throw it on, but also feeling like a missed opportunity the moment it ends.
6. Depression Cherry (2015)
After ten minutes, I was ready to entertain the possibility that Depression Cherry had somehow cleared the skyscraping bar set by Teen Dream and Bloom — that’s how much I was blown away by “Levitation” and “Sparks,” songs that took the form of the arena-ready format of their Sub Pop albums through the grainy filter of their Carpark days, spacecraft that achieved lunar flight despite being made entirely of glitter and tinfoil. This was quickly dashed by the very next song. The keyboard arpeggio, the pitter-pattering drum machine, the laggard tempo, the fact that it was called “Space Song,” it struck me as the first time I could describe something as “Beach House by numbers.” Ten years later, it’s the most popular dream-pop song ever made. Perhaps you might be thinking, “There’s no way it tops ‘Fade Into You’.” And yet, despite having a 20-year headstart of MTV and radio airplay and countless syncs, “Space Song” has it beat on Spotify by over a half-billion streams.
I still don’t see what’s so special about “Space Song,” but if I was so way off on that, maybe my initial opinion on Depression Cherry is subject to reevaluation. I didn’t necessarily think that Beach House was repeating themselves, far from it — with its slower-than-slowcore tempos, clanging drum machines, and dusty production, Depression Cherry is gritty and challenging, a welcome respite from the possibility of Beach House just cruising on lesser iterations of Bloom for the next decade, which they certainly could have done. But at some point during Side B, I’m longing for an “Astronaut” or “10 Mile Stereo” or “Irene” to jolt Depression Cherry out of its, well… I mean, it’s in the title. People who don’t really care for Beach House tend to dismiss them as “vibe,” and at the very least, I can appreciate Depression Cherry as Beach House’s low-key “difficult” album.
5. Devotion (2008)
Devotion was initially viewed as a definite step up from its predecessor, if not The Leap. Reviews were positive, though less so than you might think (both Beach House and Devotion earned a 73 on Metacritic, which are less a reflection of their quality than there being far more music publications in 2008). The shows were bigger, and Devotion includes a track that got sampled on a much better The Weeknd song than the one that used “Master Of None.”
Nowadays, Devotion takes its rightful place as a transitional work between their early, lo-fi work on hometown label Carpark and a decade where Beach House stepped up to Sub Pop and became a primary color in indie rock. And yet, Devotion is superlative in its own overlooked way, Beach House’s most legible and powerful work from a purely lyrical perspective. The subject matter is right there in the title — Legrand begins the album hearing wedding bells, pines for lost love on a rock, ponders eternity, and all of that feels like being marooned in outer space on the stunning “Astronaut.” It’s an album of lonely desires, fitting for the last time Beach House could feel like yours and yours alone.
4. 7 (2018)
As 40-something men who host a music podcast, Steven Hyden and I naturally think a lot about album sequencing, particularly the specs of a classic Side 1 Track 1. At the risk of being reductive, he likes an album that comes out firing, and while I enjoy that, too, I also like an opening curveball — a slow build or an interlude-length track, something that signals an experience (of note, The Hotelier’s Goodness and Jimmy Eat World’s Clarity are two of my favorite albums ever made).
Every Beach House opener has managed to effectively work between these two modes; From the first 30 seconds or so, you know the exact character of the album to follow, from the wafting, woozy “Saltwater,” to the bright and bold “Zebra” to the ever-upward arc of “Levitation.” This is true of 7 as well, but it takes about two seconds to know you’re getting a very different type of Beach House album. The drum roll that opens “Dark Spring” doesn’t bring to mind other Beach House songs, but My Bloody Valentine’s “Only Shallow.” Or… gasp … Deftones’ “My Own Summer (Shove It).” All-timer go hard Side 1 Track 1s. It’s all the more shocking to happen on Beach House’s seventh album rather than their second, and credit to Beach House for recognizing the need to bust up their fruitful relationship with producer Chris Coady to pursue an inspired and unexpected collaboration with Sonic Boom, the Spacemen 3 guitarist who became the mad scientist behind MGMT’s Congratulations and Panda Bear’s Tomboy.
Like those albums, 7 is soused, saturated in reverb and distortion, a Beach House album dripping neon radiation. But even beyond the jarring production shift, “Drunk in LA” states Beach House’s goals in an explicit, specific way that their previous albums did or could not (to say nothing of “L’Inconnue” and “Girl Of The Year,” which makes the sensuality implied by their past work more specific). “There’s a place I want to take you,” Legrand sang three years prior, and 7 shows you where.
3. Bloom (2012)
If memory serves, Bloom was received not just as an album that confirmed Beach House’s place as an indie rock A-lister, but one that might actually be better than Teen Dream. It was more “accomplished,” slightly more “challenging.” And all of this talk of refinement and incremental progress was forgotten once “best of the 2010s” lists came around; you had to include Beach House to tell the story of the 2010s and pretty much all of them went with Teen Dream.
I get it, though — Bloom is a great album, and Teen Dream is a definitive album, one which had the fortune of not just coming first, but doing so three weeks into a new decade. But here’s a thought: Would Beach House be Beach House if they put out Bloom in 2010? Every time I try to entertain this scenario, I just end up thinking back to how Bloom complements its predecessor — they had to become a big band before “Wild” could imagine Beach House as a rock band. “Myth” works perfectly as the opener of a “darker, more troubled” follow-up and “Irene” as the closer of a “darker, more troubled” follow-up, with its antagonistic one-note guitar solo. Sticking the landing is never quite as exciting as making the leap, but even if Bloom isn’t Beach House’s best album, it is the band at its peak.
2. Beach House (2006)
In 2025, all Beach House songs sound like Beach House, to say nothing of the bands who actively try to sound like Beach House. But with the duo’s debut, critics had to get a lot more creative with their RIYLs: Mazzy Star (because of the slide guitar and Victoria Legrand’s drawn-out vocals), Galaxie 500 (because of the languid pace and gritty production), shoegaze… because, reverb? Spiritualized? I suppose this is all proof of Beach House‘s uniquely bewitching power because even the chintzy synths became pianos, the drum machines got replaced by a drummer and Alex Scally got more pedals, Beach House arrived fully formed. “Master Of None” has a surprising legacy in mainstream male manipulator media, “Auburn And Ivory” created a “8-bit chanson” genre of one, and their first masterpiece “Apple Orchard” remains both endlessly alluring and unknowable. There’s still nothing quite like Beach House in their catalog or really anywhere; Even Beach House got too good at being Beach House to match this album’s effortless innovation.
1. Teen Dream (2010)
To get a little Sportscast with it, let’s consider the NBA’s Most Improved Player Award. Looking back on its history dating back to 1986, most of the honorees are players who took the leap from “promising rotation player” to “valuable starter” or “valuable starter” to “All-Star, but maybe not every year” — Aaron Brooks, Goran Dragic, Bobby Simmons, Pervis Ellison, Brandon Ingram, Victor Oladipo, Kevin Love, Boris Diaw, Zach Randolph, things of that nature (and Gheorge Mursean!). In the 40-some-odd years of this award, only one winner has made the basketball Hall Of Fame, though there will be three once Paul George and Giannis Antetokounmpo hang it up. And even then, the latter earned his MIP award the year he finished seventh in the MVP voting.
I bring this point up to show the regularity in which athletes (and bands) can improve from role player to rotation player, from rotation player to All-Star, even from All-Star to franchise player. But the most rare leap of all is from “really good” to generational talent, the kind that Beach House made on Teen Dream.
When did you know that Teen Dream was going to be different? Was it the first cymbal wash of “Zebra,” the “oh shit, they’ve got real drums this time?” moment? When lead single “Norway” imagined a version of shoegaze rendered with crystalline clarity rather than a gauzy scrim? Hearing Victoria Legrand straight-up belt over the chorus of “Silver Soul” or “Walk In The Park”? Beach House had made great songs before, but on Teen Dream, they started making anthems, even pop music; There’s a non-zero chance Katy Perry was aware of these songs when she decided to release an album with damn near the same title seven months later.
When albums of this nature come around, it’s only natural to wonder, “What got into these guys,” and sometimes, it’s personal tragedy or a shocking stylistic shift or an unexpected confluence of cultural events that makes someone the right artist for the right time. And then sometimes, it’s just a matter of a band working with a bigger budget and more confidence. Beach House called their shot by including a bonus DVD (can it be that it was all so simple then?) with the CD version of Teen Dream with videos for all ten songs; I’ve never seen it myself, but the highest compliment you can pay Teen Dream is that any “cinematic” rendering would be redundant at best.
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