Beach House Perform Live on the Interface

At this point, it's pretty much unanimous: Baltimore pop-gaze duo Beach House's third album 'Teen Dream' is something special. Released the last week of January, the group was greeted with an onslaught of heavy praise, so it was rather interesting to catch them at an Interface taping in our New York studio the day after the record came out. Naturally, they had some choice thoughts about the possible way critics could interpret their tunes.

"It's just kind of meaningless to intellectualize," guitarist Alex Scally tells Spinner. "You either feel it or you don't. And that's the thing -- there's nothing wrong if you don't feel it. Not everybody has to feel something. I hope that nobody likes us who doesn't feel something."

Not surprisingly, we did feel something during their taping. The band's washed-out reverbs were particularly delightful during 'Zebra' and 'Take Care,' the latter of which vocalist/keyboardist Victoria Legrand says "comes from the land of Antarctica." We didn't know what that exactly meant, so Alex clarified.

"The chord progression was something that developed in a basement of my old house, around the winter time of last year," he explains. "I was like, 'oh, this is cool but I don't have a voice really.' I gave it to Victoria in practice one day and played it for her and I told her the feelings that I had had about the way it sounded. She took it and ran with it, and turned it into this incredible thing."

That said, it's not like that's a typical way Beach House composes songs – they're emphatic that each one comes from different origins. "It all comes from feelings," Legrand says. "And feelings are inspired by sounds, or sounds inspire feelings, and it's chemistry, and it happens different every time."