Other People

Beach House makes music that exists in the space between sleeping and waking, and this track sits deep in that liminal zone. The arrangement is dense and slow-moving, Victoria Legrand's organ chords holding long notes that blur into each other while Alex Scally's guitar lines drift through the haze like shapes in fog. The tempo is almost funereal in its patience, the drums a barely-there pulse that feels less like rhythm and more like a heartbeat you're only half-aware of. Legrand's voice is one of the most distinctive instruments in contemporary dream pop — low, resonant, and slightly detached, as if she's narrating from somewhere slightly outside the frame. Here she uses it to explore estrangement, the unsettling way people can move through your life and leave almost no trace, or the inverse — how you can feel like an observer in your own relationships. The emotional register is melancholy but not devastated, the sadness cool and observational rather than raw. The production is layered to the point of thickness, sound stacking on sound until it feels immersive, the kind of record that requires headphones to fully enter. This is late-night music for solitary moments, for sitting with difficult feelings rather than trying to resolve them.