For a band known for slow-burning dream pop and a healthy resistance to over-explaining, Beach House’s 7 might be their most cosmically aligned album yet—fueled by creative change, Warholian ghosts, and what might be a sentient arpeggiator.
“Doing two records in one year, we pushed it as far as we could,” they say, reflecting on the back-to-back 2015 releases (Depression Cherry and Thank Your Lucky Stars) that, in hindsight, now feel like a full closet purge. “There’s no repeating that. Something in us knew change was coming.”
That change arrived in the form of a practice space turned home studio, a refreshing lack of overthinking, and some unexpected numerological weirdness. “We didn’t plan it,” they insist, “but so much kept lining up around the number seven—timing, collaborators, all of it. Superfans found even more connections we didn’t know about.”
So 7 it is. Not just their seventh album, but also a lucky charm of freak coincidences and instinctual creation. “We weren’t engineering anything,” they explain. “We were catching songs—catching sounds like fireflies.” That poetic spontaneity came with a new collaborator too: Sonic Boom, the former Spacemen 3 legend who helped guide the sessions while resisting his usual producer credit. “It was more: should we ask Sonic Boom?” they recall. “Once your mind clears, those ideas just float in.”
Musically, 7 still flirts with Beach House’s signature haze, but now it’s more jagged and tactile. “Black Car,” with its Depeche Mode vibes, is built around a twitchy arpeggio from a vintage synth they discovered back in 2012. “The way it jumps—low, high, low, high—it just started ratcheting upward. We followed it.”
If that sounds romanticized, well, welcome to their world. Even the track “Girl of the Year,” which fans have linked to #MeToo and gender politics, swerves away from topicality and steers into pop art melancholy. “It’s more about Warhol glamour,” they clarify. “The fleeting. The darkness under the mirror. Not political, just… cinematic.”
That lens—cinema over literalism—is everywhere on the album, especially in the artwork: ripped-up, collaged, fragmented, and rooted in a 1960s-70s vision of womanhood. “It’s about how women were used in film and photography, how their image has been shaped. It’s visual poetry.”
Their process is as anti-streaming-era as it gets. “I’m never gonna listen to music the way people do now,” they admit. “I’ll always be the person playing one song over and over, staring at the stereo. It’s a form of respect.”
In a world ruled by algorithms and playlists, 7 is a quiet act of rebellion. One that whispers: maybe you don’t need to chase the moment. Maybe you just wait for it to find you.
Listen to the interview above and then check out the video below.
