“We’re sitting in a purple velvet… chamber, I’m wearing feathers, and Alex [Scally] is wearing a full leather suit,” beams the raspy voice of Beach House’s Victoria LeGrand. The singer still isn’t exactly used to the United State of Zoom we’ve self-adjusted to, but having been in the game for close to two decades, LeGrand certainly does know a thing or two about the interview graft, and gladly conspires with us to create a truly scenic introduction – “we’ll try to make it seem as though we’re somewhere having a beer.”

It’s been a while since the Baltimore-based dream poppers, who released their haunting, self-titled debut in 2006, have had to go through the motions of an album campaign, hopping from shoot to performance as they navigate a press tour. Terming the four-year interim between now and the release of 2018’s 7 as “surviving”, the world has since stopped in its tracks, seen the eventual demise of Donald Trump, and even propelled their Depression Cherry track Space Song to the top of the TikTok charts.

But as charmed as LeGrand and Scally are about their newfound viral currency, none of these changing tides excites the pair as much as returning to the stage to tour their forthcoming album, Once Twice Melody. The two are actually in a rehearsal break as we speak, recounting all the intense, creative and borderline psychotic outbursts they experienced along the way. “It felt like three years of intense processing many, many, many levels of existence,” says LeGrand, “but that desire and letting any kind of whim enter us fully, was the mission.”

A truly cinematic culmination of the past few years – something both members are reluctant to spell out for fear of ripping the live, thumping heart from their otherworldly sound  – the band’s journey to this point has been all things incredible, psychedelic, dramatic, fantastical and totally maddening. “We’re so excited about the record coming out because it’s finally leaving us – and it needs to,” LeGrand half-jokes, “We’re living in such isolated times, so any chance to engage people like [this] is an amazing moment – it makes us feel alive.”

It was a drizzly November morning when news broke of the band’s forthcoming project, a double LP split into four chapters and a whopping eighteen tracks. The idea came to the duo towards the end of the editing process – “when [we were] looking at songs like Sunset and Masquerade, and then New Romance and Modern Love Stories. You’re seeing this range of worlds, like microcosms inside of an album, and you don’t want to give them up, so you feel a little bit more indulgent than you did in the past.”

When the first chapter dropped later that very night, fans were ecstatic. Reintroducing themselves to the world with a slightly maturer sound, the band’s dreamy and melancholic totem poles remained well-intact in titles like Pink Funeral (and later Masquerade and Illusion of Forever), while Superstar went about setting the foundations for an album that would act as life’s own soundtrack.

Triumphant and teary-eyed, you could picture the songs’ subtle synths, shimmering piano and heartbeat drums bringing a coming-of-age classic to its fuzzy conclusion – blaring out of an old Ford as the beloved protagonists glide down an empty motorway lit only by amber streetlights, flashing cat eyes and the moon. LeGrand terms it a “cosmic lovesong”, grinning, as she shares in its fearless, emotional complexity. “It’s just one of those songs that has a very large wave within it.”

And yet it’s Once Twice Melody, the albums title track and opening chorus line, that foregrounds this showcase with its panging synths and sincere yet murky vision of nostalgia for a barely distant past. “When those words came with the song, and the whole identity of the song in itself, it just felt like such a scene,” LeGrand explains. “Like an ode, a portrait of musing; of existing and getting lost in a world that you don’t necessarily understand, being lured down a path of imagination, of innocence. It just felt very striking, and a wonderful place to start the story.”

At times, LeGrand describes the album as a big baby, nurtured by her and Scally’s ear for the experimental. Other times it takes on the form of an enormous book, its cracked spine and dogeared pages full of musings on life, love and longing. A “fleeting Victorian fever dream” came next, then an intergalactic ride through the sky on a surfboard made of stars. But this world wasn’t meant for just the two of them, and so the duo decided on curating a slew of visualisers, one for each track, to bring said poetry to life – thrusting open more doors to the worlds hidden inside the record in the most striking ways they could find.

One artist who took up the directorial reins was Jennifer Juniper Stratford, a previous collaborator who directed the retro-tinged video for The Traveller with her best friend and Director of Photography Travis Peterson, back in 2015. Years later, Peterson would take his own life, leaving Stratford with a new vision of the message of the song: a beautiful depiction of life on the edge, adjacent to the spirit world. “The whole thing just goes straight to the depths of the soul,” she writes over email.

This experience provides a stark precursor to ESP, picking up where The Traveller leaves off with a renewed sense of recovery and connection. Bringing her canonically psychedelic visual style to the project, the artist worked closely with a dancer to translate the song’s lyrical feeling into movement and a “desire to reconnect and not feel lost”. The resulting everyman, lost and obscured by a daze of technicolour swirls and foreboding written wisdom, is uncannily breathtaking. “I hoped that showing a shadowy figure would help the viewer feel like the person in the video could be them, and that they could work through these confusing times and still find love and compassion,” Stratford elaborates. “I think that’s what Beach House is all about.”

Moving through these undiscovered islands, healing ourselves from the scars of the past or dreaming about the lovers that haven’t entered our lives yet, it’s apparent that healing is at the very heart of this record. Where it all began doesn’t necessarily matter, although LeGrand does recall the early stages of The Bells, a track from OTM’s final chapter which takes on the sonic glow of an old holiday snap sat on your nan’s mantlepiece. With its tinny guitars and ABBA-esque mantras, really, The Bells echoes the band’s affinity for the musical styles of the sixties and early seventies through a truly jubilant final offering, studded with searing church bells, tumultuous string breakdowns and possibly the band’s first foray into the genre of wedding reception floor-filler.

“When the little things are together in one home, we’ll have a drink, and feel some kind of sane feeling of crying, or any amalgamation of emotions,” says LeGrand when I end our chat asking how the band plan to wave such a flurry of emotions off into the nether. “All you can do is share, and hope that sharing saves something, you or gives love in some capacity. I think that’s the goal.”

After all, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger – “right?” – asks LeGrand in earnest. “Once Twice Melody did that.”

Once Twice Melody is out on Bella Union this Friday.