Mistletone

Beach House‘s new album 7 is out Friday, May 11 on Mistletone via Inertia Music. Pre-order the LP on exclusive Australian-only white vinyl or CD, while stocks last, from Mistletone mail order.

Photo credit: Shawn Brackbill

7 features standouts including the Valentine’s Day 2018 single “Lemon Glow” [link here], along with “Black Car,” “Drunk In LA,” “Dark Spring,” and their latest offering, the transcendent “Dive”[link here]. All of the songs on 7 began in Beach House’s home studio in Baltimore, and were finished at Carriage House in Stamford, Connecticut and Palmetto Studio in Los Angeles. The album was mixed by Alan Moulder.

Beach House (Alex Scally and Victoria Legrand) released B-sides and Rarities in 2017, which served as a proverbial “cleaning out the closet” to pave way for a new creative process.  Their approach in the creation of 7 was rebirth and rejuvenation.  Scally and Legrand used to limit themselves to what they thought they could perform live, but this time that limitation was ignored.  Also, instead of one long studio session, Beach House recorded when inspired by batches of songs, which resulted in five mini-sessions over the course of eleven months.

Unlike the last four albums, 7 didn’t have a producer in the traditional sense. Spacemen 3’s Sonic Boom (Peter Kember) became a significant force on this record by shedding conventions and helping to keep the songs alive, fresh, and protected from the destructive elements of recording studio overproduction and over-perfection.  The band’s trusted live drummer from 2016 to the present, James Barone, played on the entire record, helping to keep rhythm at the center of a lot of these songs.

7 is available for preorder now from Mistletone mail order on white vinyl, exclusive to the Australian LP pressing, while stocks last.

7 is our 7th full-length record. At its release, we will have been a band for over 13 years. We have now written and released a total of 77 songs together.

Throughout the process of recording 7, we wanted to rethink old methods and shed some self-imposed limitations. In the past, we often limited our writing to parts that we could perform live. On 7, we decided to follow whatever came naturally. As a result, there are some songs with no guitar, and some without keyboard. There are songs with layers and production that we could never recreate live, and that is exciting to us. Basically, we let our creative moods, instead of instrumentation, dictate the album’s feel.

In the past, the economics of recording have dictated that we write for a year, go to the studio, and record the entire record as quickly as possible. We have always hated this because by the time the recording happens, a certain excitement about older songs has often been lost. This time, we built a “home” studio, and began all of the songs there.  Whenever we had a group of 3-4 songs that we were excited about, we would go to a “proper” recording studio and finish recording them there. This way, the amount of time between the original idea and the finished song was pretty short (of the album’s 11 songs, 8 were finished at Carriage House in Stamford, CT and 2 at Palmetto Studio in Los Angeles).

7 was co-produced by Beach House and Sonic Boom. He became a great force on this record, in shedding conventions and in helping to keep the songs alive, fresh and protected from the destructive forces of recording studio over-production and over-perfection. And James Barone, who became our live drummer in 2016, played on the entire album. His tastes and the trust we have in him really helped us keep rhythm at the center of a lot of these songs. 7 was mixed by Alan Moulder.

In a more general sense, we are interested by the human mind’s (and nature’s) tendency to create forces equal and opposite to those present. Thematically, this record often deals with the beauty that arises in dealing with darkness; the empathy and love that grows from collective trauma; the place one reaches when they accept rather than deny (see “Dark Spring,” “Pay No Mind,” “Lemon Glow,” “Dive,” “Black Car,” “Lose Your Smile”).  The twisted double edge of glamour, with its perils and perfect moments, was an endless source (see “L’Inconnue,” “Drunk In LA,” “Woo,” “Girl Of The Year,” “Last Ride”).

The title, 7, itself is simply a number that represents our seventh record. We hoped its simplicity would encourage people to look inside. No title using words that we could find felt like an appropriate summation of the album.

The number 7 does represent some interesting connections in numerology. 1 and 7 have always shared a common look, so 7 feels like the perfect step in the sequence to act as a restart or “semi-first.”  Most early religions also had a fascination with 7 as being the highest level of spirituality, as in “Seventh Heaven.”  At our best creative moments, we felt we were channeling some kind of heavy truth, and we sincerely hope the listeners will feel that.

Much Love,

Beach House

Beach House
7 
Tracklisting:

1. Dark Spring
2. Pay No Mind
3. Lemon Glow
4. L’Inconnue
5. Drunk in LA
6. Dive
7. Black Car
8. Lose Your Smile
9. Woo
10. Girl Of The Year
11. Last Ride​