The lead single released in February "Lemon Glow" for 2018’s new Beach House album 7, has been followed up with a second single "Dive." 7 is scheduled to be released May 11. It’s the band’s seventh album together — and as they explain in an essay accompanying the album announcement, its creative process marks a significant divergence from how the Baltimore duo has made albums in the past.
Instead of recording all of the songs at once, they went into the studio five different times over the course of eleven months, recording the songs that they felt most excited about at the time. The album doesn’t have a traditional producer, though they do cite Spacemen 3’s Peter Kember (aka Sonic Boom) as an influential part of the record, as well as the contributions of live drummer James Barone, who played on the album.
"We wanted to rethink old methods and shed some self-imposed limitations," Alex Scally and Victoria Legrand write in the essay. "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."
01. Dark Spring
02. Pay No Mind
03. Lemon Glow
04. L’Inconnue
05. Drunk in LA
06. Dive
07. Black Car
08. Lose Your Smile
09. Woo
10. Girl Of The Year
11. Last Ride