On their eight album Once Twice Melody, dream pop duo Beach House show no signs of diminishing just yet.
When you’re so long into a career that has, if not quite defined but certainly dominated, an entire genre for at least a decade, a lesser band would have perhaps taken the opportunity to slow down, to begin the process of deceleration.
Yet Once Twice Melody is the sound of Alex Scally and Victoria Legrand at their most elegant and visionary. For a band long tagged with being cinematic, this is their most widescreen composition of music (Legrand’s uncle, interestingly, is the great French film composer Michel Legrand).
Eight albums in, they made sure to innovate: they duo produced the album without an outside producer; a live string ensemble was invited to enhance the songs; and the album was released in four chapters over several months, breaking what could have been an overstuffed double album into a four stylish yet manageable vignettes.
We caught up with Alex Scally to discuss the making of Once Twice Melody and the band’s love of Australia.
Once Twice Melody is out now via Sub Pop and Mistletone.
For more on this topic, follow the Indie Observer.
Love Indie?
Get the latest Indie news, features, updates and giveaways straight to your inbox Learn more
You took a longer time between album releases than usual. Was that because of the pandemic or did you want to really take your time with this one?
It was neither actually. The body of work and the way the songs grew just demanded a certain level of attention and effort. We looked up and we were in a huge pit and we had to dig ourselves out but then that just made the pit deeper, or something like that!
Did you have an excess of songs ready for this album then? Is that why you had enough material to fit a double album?
We actually had far more than what ended up on the record which is mental. I don’t know how that happened though (laughs). Starting a record is a generative phase where a lot of ideas that have been kicking around start to materialise and we get to look at everything. And for some reason this time there was more – again, I don’t think it was pandemic-related, maybe just related to a mid-life crisis.
What prompted the chapter style of release?
Not totally sure, not sure at all. Creativity is still quite mysterious to us and I’m not really sure where it came from.
Was it easy to find a nice flow for the chapters to come together though?
The chapter idea was born initially out of the double LP, so we started thinking of them as sides. We then started thinking of beginnings and ends for each chapter. And that actually helped us realise that, say, a certain song had no place on the record, that we should kick it off because it was redundant or didn’t have any place in the story. When it came to the thought of the sides/chapters it helped us finalise the record and fully get an idea of what the whole story was.
Do you think each chapter is capable of breaking down into a mini-story?
I think so. Each one has a definite beginning and end, you know? So the opening of the first chapter really feels like an opening song to us. On our past records, we always spend a lot of time on our opening tracks, it’s always been really important. So with the chapters, we very much chose the beginning and end for each one, and kind of hoped to have it be a little ride within the overall thing.
I think you’ve still achieved that with the opening title track.
Yeah, and also sequencing it took a very long time. We still wanted it to feel like an album if you listened to it straight through.
It must have been incredible using the live string ensemble
I think it’s something we’ve always dreamed of doing. For whatever reason, these songs have a lot of string synths that we were using as we were making them. At some point, we started to realise that the synths sounded like we were trying to do real synths, so we thought ‘ok, let’s just see if we can make this happen’. And it wasn’t as hard as you’d think. It was still hard, it cost a lot of money and we’ll probably never do it again, but we were able to do it and it was really cool and fun (laughs).
People have always labeled your music as cinematic but this album really does feel like your most cinematic yet. It almost feels like a soundtrack with the four parts.
Yeah, that makes sense.
What artists influenced the sound of Once Twice Melody? The first chapter especially reminded me a bit of Broadcast.
I see. I think we actually tend to block out a lot of other music when we’re in deep creative states. Broadcast are awesome though. I think we both listened to them a lot when we were in college and still adore the band. It’s funny, I think that Broadcast probably also listened to a lot of the stuff we listened to as well. We love 60s music, for example.
This is the first album you’ve produced entirely on your own? Was that challenging?
We’ve never used producers in a traditional role. We’ve always arranged everything fully and had a precise idea of how our music should sound. We’ve always had the producer kind of be just another brain in the room, another pair of ears. That’s really nice actually, because if you’ve been working on something a lot it’s nice to hear anyone else’s perspective. Sometimes it can free you from your fixation on something that isn’t worth fixating on.
Not having the producer this time was less of a choice and more forced on us by the circumstances of the last few years. It was fun in a way to not have anyone else involved because it meant we could basically do whatever we wanted, all the time. It was also a curse at times though, because sometimes certain moments took on a steel cage deathmatch type quality! Not in a bad way, it’s just that whenever people care so much about something, it can be intense.
Being eight albums in now, did you feel a need to be more innovative?
It’s hard to say because a lot of things are just subconscious, you know? They’re happening somewhere in your mind without you realising it.
At this stage of your career, do you feel you’ve been on a natural progression?
Yeah, everything has felt very natural for us. We’ve never really thought about what we’re going to do next. We finish a tour, we go home, we don’t know what we’re going to do, a couple of months go by, we get bored and start writing songs and get inspired again. We feel very lucky that the spirit or the inspiration has continued to be there.
When was the last time you were in Australia? It must have been a few years now.
We came in spring – your summer – of 2019.
Any nice memories?
Of course. It’s funny because whenever we talk to Australians there, they’re always trying to leave or there’s a lot of people talking about leaving and travelling. We just can’t believe how lovely it is there – the weather, the food, the beaches, the cities are so elegant. The people we meet are wonderful. It’s just so funny that everyone seems to want to leave because it always seems like a paradise to us!
We had some really cool experiences. We played Meredith (Music) Festival and that’s a really neat place, with that natural amphitheatre out in the country. It’s a cool place to have a festival.
Do you have any tour dates in the U.S. coming up?
Yeah, we’re touring shortly, knocking on wood (proceeds to knock on wood over Zoom) that everything keeps going and there aren’t any more scary COVID variants to come. Hopefully as the world stabilises there’ll be more chances to make plans all around the world.
