7 Review

The stated method was to reject anything that sounded like a Beach House move, and the discipline pays off immediately. Dark Spring opens with a drum pattern that motors rather than drifts and a guitar that is genuinely dirty. Lemon Glow is built on a pulsing filter that would not be out of place on a dance record. Dive begins as a ballad and then halfway through the tempo doubles and the whole thing becomes something else, which is the single best structural decision in their catalogue.

Girl of the Year and Last Ride give the album a proper ending. The fog is still there, the voice still sits in that low unhurried register, but everything around it has been sharpened and roughened. Some of the lyrics are their most direct, particularly about womanhood and image, and the record has an anger in it that nothing before had. Their third great album and the one that proved they were not stuck.