From ‘Space Song’ to the deepest cuts in their catalogue, we rank the 25 greatest songs from dream-pop masters Beach House.

I feel like I never get an opportunity to write about just how much I love this band, so it’s a massive pleasure to put together the 25 tracks I think represent Beach House at their very best. For a lot of people, you’d probably expect ‘Space Song’ to be number one. It’s their huge TikTok hit and, by some distance, their most-streamed song. But Beach House have so much more to offer than ‘Space Song’, and I’m hopeful that anyone who found the band through it might discover some deeper cuts and hidden gems here.

Beach House have been my favourite band for well over a decade. I started listening to them before their breakthrough Teen Dream, so watching their catalogue grow over the years has been nothing short of amazing. From their debut onwards, Victoria Legrand and Alex Scally have continued to develop their sound while somehow maintaining that unmistakable quality that made me fall in love with them in the first place.

There are songs from every era of Beach House on this list. I wanted to represent as much of their catalogue as possible, but ultimately that wasn’t particularly difficult when every one of their records contains moments that emanate magic. There’s something genuinely otherworldly about the music they make, and their discography is one of the most consistent and beautifully constructed of any artist I know.

Legrand and Scally are two of the finest songwriters of the 21st century and, despite the band’s fiercely loyal following, I still don’t think Beach House receive quite the acclaim they deserve. They’re very much an artist’s artist, with everyone from Jay-Z and Beyoncé attending their shows to Kendrick Lamar and The Weeknd sampling their music on ‘Money Trees’, ‘The Party & The After Party’ and ‘Loft Music’.

Anyway, if ‘Space Song’ was your first taste of Beach House and you’ve landed here looking for where to go next, I hope you find something you love. These are 25 songs that have meant the world to me over the years.

25) Better Times

‘Better Times’ is one of the more overlooked songs on Teen Dream, perhaps simply because it’s surrounded by so many of Beach House’s best. Despite the title, there’s a real melancholy to it, with Legrand looking back at better times that have already passed and can’t be recovered. Scally’s guitar has a particularly lovely tone here, reminiscent of Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Albatross’ in places. The ending is great too, with one of those gorgeous outros that Beach House seemed to become professional writers of on Teen Dream. It might not have the emotional immediacy of ‘Take Care’, but it’s exactly the kind of deep cut that demonstrates just how ridiculously consistent the album is.

24) Real Love

‘Real Love’ is the only track on Teen Dream that feels stripped back. Instead of the fuller sound that defines much of the album, it’s built predominantly around piano. Teen Dream is full of Scally’s distinctive guitar work, so hearing the band build a Beach House song around piano instead immediately gives ‘Real Love’ a different character. It’s like the album suddenly empties out just before the finale. Legrand’s performance is absolutely central too; there’s far less instrumentation for her voice to disappear into, and as the song develops she becomes increasingly powerful.

23) Once Twice Melody

‘Once Twice Melody’ was our first taste of Beach House’s most recent album of the same name, and it served as a mission statement for the grand, sprawling double album it would introduce. Musically, it’s unusually weightless even by Beach House standards. There’s no huge ‘Myth’-style payoff or ‘Sparks’-style wall of guitar; instead, it simply glides along on sweeping strings, synths and a gentle rhythm. The song floats past you, setting the scene for the strange, cinematic world of Once Twice Melody.

22) Girl of the Year

At the time of its release, I think 7 was a little too weird for me as a Beach House album, but over the years I’ve really come to appreciate it as one of their best, simply because of how much effort they put into doing something different. ‘Girl of the Year’, however, always felt like the closest sibling to the albums that preceded it. Musically, the track is devastating, particularly the guitar line that follows those synths at the beginning and end of the song. It’s incredibly simple, but so bleakly captivating, bringing some of the melancholy of their earlier records into the stranger, darker world of 7.

21) Majorette

I feel like ‘Majorette’ is about as close as Beach House get to writing a classic indie song. It isn’t as emotionally intense as much of their work, nor is it particularly slow or dreamy. Instead, it has this great driving beat and a simple, repetitive guitar riff that still sounds unmistakably Beach House. The track is breezy, especially compared with some of the heavier moments elsewhere on Thank Your Lucky Stars. If you want Beach House with a little more pace and without the usual emotional devastation, ‘Majorette’ is about as good as it gets.

20) Rough Song

‘Rough Song’ might be one of the most deceptively catchy songs Beach House have ever written. The organ melody has this almost playful quality to it, but underneath it Legrand delivers some of the strangest and darkest imagery on Thank Your Lucky Stars. There are fragments of birthday parties, cake, basements and someone seemingly disappearing, but they never quite assemble into a story, instead feeling like pieces of some half-remembered nightmare. That contrast between something so immediately beautiful and something much more unsettling underneath is classic Beach House. By the time Legrand repeatedly sings “I need to leave” towards the end, the dream has started to feel more like something you desperately want to wake up from.

19) Auburn and Ivory

‘Auburn and Ivory’ captures a side of Beach House that they never quite recreated after their debut. Everything is rawer and slightly stranger here. There’s a darkness to Legrand’s vocals, while Scally’s warped slide guitar and the wheezing organ give the song an almost haunted quality. Beach House would obviously go on to become bigger, richer and far more polished, but the dusty, homemade eeriness of these early recordings remains completely unique. ‘Auburn and Ivory’ might be the best example of it.

18) Days of Candy

God, this one’s harrowing. The final song on Depression Cherry had to give an album with that name a suitably devastating send-off, and ‘Days of Candy’ certainly does that. It begins with this dark, almost sacred choir, recorded with eight singers from Pearl River Community College in Mississippi, before slowly transforming into something much more recognisably Beach House. Legrand seems to be looking back at something beautiful that has disappeared, with the “days of candy” feeling like an idealised past that you desperately want to return to but know you never can. As the choir gives way to Scally’s guitar and Legrand’s voice takes centre stage, the whole thing becomes absolutely heart-wrenching. It’s nostalgia at its most painful: not simply missing something, but knowing those days are gone forever.

17) Beyond Love

‘Beyond Love’ is one of the darker moments on Depression Cherry, taking the language and imagery of romance and twisting it into something much more unsettling. The opening image of tearing every petal from the rose in someone’s mouth is particularly striking, taking something traditionally associated with love and almost violently destroying it. That tension runs throughout the song, as Legrand moves between heartbreak, nightmares, strange visions and the question of whether we could ever really exist “beyond love”. Musically, Scally’s distorted guitar seems to circle endlessly around Legrand’s voice, giving the whole thing this hypnotic, unresolved feeling. It’s beautiful and romantic on the surface, but the closer you listen, the stranger and darker it becomes.

16) The Traveller

I remember when I first heard ‘The Traveller’, I thought its ending could have been an entire song in itself, but over the years the whole thing has grown to become one of my favourite Beach House tracks. There’s this constant sense of movement created by the repetitive organ and Legrand’s deep vocal, which fits a song preoccupied with time passing, ageing and an uncertain future. The final verse is particularly beautiful, with Legrand looking out at a starless sky and reflecting on a life that has already gone by as “Saturn” continues turning. Then that incredible ending arrives, suddenly shifting the song into something brighter and almost euphoric as Scally’s whimpering guitar lines weave their way through the track. Part of me still wishes it went on for another five minutes.

15) Levitation

This song is so hypnotic it can almost make me feel a bit sickly sometimes, in the best possible way. As the opener to Depression Cherry, I think you can immediately tell Beach House wanted to get weirder with this record. ‘Levitation’ starts relatively sparsely, with Legrand’s voice floating over these psychedelic, swirling organs, but they hold the bass back until around halfway through. By the time it arrives, those synths have been swelling for so long that suddenly hearing this much fuller sound underneath makes the whole track glorious.

That slow transformation is one of the things Beach House do better than almost anyone. There’s this constant feeling of ascending throughout ‘Levitation’, as if the song is gradually lifting you further and further away from where you started. Nothing ever really explodes, but somehow the song becomes completely overwhelming. It’s psychedelic, slightly disorientating and beautiful.

14) Walk in the Park

I love the breakdown towards the end of ‘Walk in the Park’. The way the outro just keeps building, getting fuller and fuller as Legrand’s repeated vocal becomes increasingly intense, is exactly what made me fall in love with Beach House in the first place. I’m not an amazing songwriter by any means, but I’d say this song massively influenced the way I personally think about writing music, particularly that idea of taking something relatively simple and gradually building it into something completely overwhelming.

Lyrically, it’s essentially a breakup song, but an unusually unsentimental one. The narrator isn’t begging for someone to come back; there’s almost a cold acceptance that eventually this person will simply fade from their life. That makes the enormous emotional release at the end hit even harder. The words might suggest acceptance, but the music feels like all the emotion that’s still left underneath.

13) Sparks

‘Sparks’ is a really interesting one because it was a pretty major departure for Beach House when it arrived. It was the first song released from Depression Cherry in July 2015, and after the pristine, expansive sound of Bloom, it immediately felt rougher and stranger. Scally’s guitar is distorted into this huge, fuzzy wall of noise that is closer to shoegaze than almost anything Beach House had released before. The song also incorporates a sample of the band themselves, with Legrand’s voice chopped and manipulated into the strange repeating vocal texture that runs throughout the track.

After Bloom, Beach House deliberately wanted to strip things back. They felt that playing increasingly large venues had pushed them towards a louder, more aggressive sound, so with Depression Cherry they wanted to return to simplicity, using fewer live drums and giving percussion a more limited role. That’s what makes ‘Sparks’ such an interesting introduction to the record: it’s simultaneously part of Beach House stripping everything back and one of the noisiest songs they’ve ever made.

12) Silver Soul

‘Silver Soul’ comes immediately after ‘Zebra’ on Teen Dream. If ‘Zebra’ announces Beach House’s bigger sound, then ‘Silver Soul’ demonstrates just how lush and hypnotic this new version of the band could be. Scally’s woozy, sliding guitar constantly bends out of shape. Legrand’s performance is equally brilliant, starting relatively restrained before becoming increasingly forceful. By the repeated “it is happening again” section, the song has transformed from something dreamy into something almost overwhelming.

‘Silver Soul’ would later find an enormous second life when Kendrick Lamar sampled it extensively on ‘Money Trees’, from good kid, m.A.A.d city. Beach House’s guitar and vocals are manipulated and looped throughout the track, meaning one of the defining songs from Kendrick’s breakthrough album is essentially built around a piece of Teen Dream. Alongside The Weeknd’s use of ‘Master of None’ on ‘The Party & The After Party’, it’s probably the most famous example of Beach House’s music finding its way into an entirely different world.

11) Pink Funeral

‘Pink Funeral’ was one of the songs that excited me most about Beach House’s most recent album, Once Twice Melody. The band takes some of the darkness they explored on 7 and combines it with what made that incredible run from Teen Dream to Thank Your Lucky Stars so powerful. Once Twice Melody was also the first Beach House album produced entirely by the band themselves, as well as their first to feature a live string ensemble, with arrangements by David Campbell.

Those strings give ‘Pink Funeral’ this sweeping, almost film-score quality, but they sit alongside one of Beach House’s darker electronic arrangements, making the song feel simultaneously orchestral and synthetic. Even the title feels quintessentially Beach House: ‘Pink Funeral’ puts something soft, romantic and beautiful next to death. That tension runs through the entire song. It’s gorgeous, but there’s always something ominous lurking underneath.

10) Take Care

‘Take Care’ is unusually direct and sincere. It closes Teen Dream, so after an album that massively expanded Beach House’s sound, they finish with a straightforward declaration of devotion. The central refrain, “I’ll take care of you”, is remarkably uncomplicated by Beach House standards. Their lyrics can often be elusive and dreamlike, but here they basically write an unashamedly sentimental love song.

Personally, I’ve always felt like this song is speaking directly to me. There have been so many times over the years when I’ve been upset and turned to Beach House, only for their music to, in its own way, “take care” of me. Maybe that’s why such a simple sentiment hits me as hard as it does. Teen Dream opens with ‘Zebra’, Beach House announcing just how much bigger they’d become, and closes with ‘Take Care’, demonstrating just how emotionally powerful that bigger sound could be.

9) Lemon Glow

‘Lemon Glow’ was the first song released from 7, arriving on 15 February 2018 before Beach House had even announced the album’s title. They posted it with the simple message, “Wishing everyone out there love tonight”. Both the song and the album feel like Beach House at their most experimental, messing with elements of the tried-and-tested formula they’d perfected across the run from Teen Dream to Thank Your Lucky Stars. ‘Lemon Glow’ is built around this weird, throbbing synth that runs through almost the entire song, giving it a considerably darker and more psychedelic feel than much of their earlier work.

Beach House themselves described 7 as something of a creative restart or “semi-first” album. They were interested in the idea of beauty emerging from darkness, and ‘Lemon Glow’ might be one of the clearest examples of that: strange, murky and slightly unsettling, but still unmistakably beautiful.

8) On the Sea

This is one of the strongest tracks on Bloom. It’s also one of the album’s sparsest songs, yet somehow one of its most enormous-sounding. ‘On the Sea’ starts relatively exposed, with guitar and piano, then gradually accumulates layers without ever introducing drums. By the end, the track is huge, despite there being no conventional rhythmic climax.

Legrand’s vocals are at their absolute peak here. The way she sings the outro is so commanding, gradually rising above the swirling keys and guitars around her. Lyrically, the song circles around bodies, spirits, fate, the time we have left and the idea of eventually being swallowed by the world. It’s unusually direct territory for Beach House, even if Legrand still leaves enough ambiguity for you to find your own meaning in it.

‘On the Sea’ demonstrates how, by Bloom, Beach House didn’t need volume or a massive drum beat to create a sense of scale. Sometimes all they needed was to let a song slowly grow until it overwhelmed you.

7) Zebra

‘Zebra’ is where Beach House levelled up in such a noticeable way. This was where the band took the dreamy sound of their first two records and turned it into something far more grandiose. Touring Devotion throughout 2008 had made them want their songs to “surge and pulse more”. They’d found themselves continually turning up the volume live, and that energy fed directly into Teen Dream. Interestingly, they were still largely using the same instruments they’d used on Devotion; the transformation came from how they recorded and used them.

It’s significant that ‘Zebra’ is the very first thing you hear on the record. Those opening guitar notes introduce an album where Beach House suddenly sound wider, clearer and more powerful. ‘Zebra’ also announces one of the biggest changes to their sound on Teen Dream: real drums. After the drum machines and programmed percussion that characterised their first two albums, Daniel Franz’s live drumming gives the song a different sense of movement. When those drums kick in beneath Scally’s looping guitar, Beach House suddenly sound warmer and more alive.

6) Gila

Boy, is this song epic live these days. But even in its original studio form, ‘Gila’ was a real step up from Beach House’s debut. That’s one of the things I love about this band: for much of their discography, each record seemed to expand on what they were capable of, and Devotion was the first real example of that progression. The record still has that intimate, homespun quality of their debut, but everything feels richer and more assured. Scally’s guitar is particularly gorgeous here, giving ‘Gila’ this woozy, almost seasick quality as it curls around Legrand’s voice.

It’s also a great example of just how important repetition is to Beach House. The song doesn’t rely on huge structural changes; instead, the same musical ideas circle around and around until they become hypnotic, something the band would continue to perfect over the albums that followed. Legrand’s voice is incredible too. On those first couple of records, she sings in this remarkably deep, dark register that gives early Beach House a character all of its own.

5) Somewhere Tonight

‘Somewhere Tonight’ is the dreamlike waltz that closes Thank Your Lucky Stars, Beach House’s surprise second album of 2015. The record arrived on 16 October, only seven weeks after Depression Cherry, but despite their proximity, Beach House were adamant that Thank Your Lucky Stars wasn’t simply a collection of leftovers. The songs were written after Depression Cherry, between July and November 2014, with both records eventually recorded during the same sessions. There’s something fitting about ‘Somewhere Tonight’ bringing that extraordinary year for Beach House to a close, not with some enormous finale, but with two people seemingly lost in a slow dance together.

If this song doesn’t bring a tear to your eye, I don’t know what will. ‘Somewhere Tonight’ always makes me imagine a wedding, a couple slowly moving through their first dance. There’s this warm sense of love radiating through it, like you’ve been transported into some dimly lit velvet ballroom. The slinky guitars are gorgeous, the drum beat is beautifully simple, and the whole thing fills me with so much emotion.

4) Space Song

‘Space Song’ is the third track on Depression Cherry, Beach House’s fifth album. It would have been easy to put it at number one. With almost 200 million views on YouTube and an astonishing 1.7 billion streams on Spotify, it has become Beach House’s defining song for a huge number of people. It’s definitely one of their best, but for me, it lacks some of the emotion that can be found in their very greatest work.

That said, it’s absolutely gorgeous. The soaring guitar line that slides across the song, those watery arpeggiated synths and Legrand’s vocals combine to create something hypnotic. I can totally understand why it blew up on TikTok years after its release. The track is genuinely mind-melting.

Victoria Legrand had a great response to its unexpected viral success, describing the song’s new life as being like “this comet that’s doing its own thing”. She didn’t seem particularly interested in analysing why it had happened, instead embracing the idea that it could act as a gateway for younger listeners discovering Beach House. And what a gateway it became. For a dream-pop song released in 2015 to eventually rack up more than a billion streams is pretty extraordinary. ‘Space Song’ ended up reaching an audience far bigger than anyone could have imagined when it was first released.

3) Myth

I remember being in my halls at university when this song came out. It felt like a revelation, like everything Beach House had done so well on Teen Dream but amplified. This is where I think Beach House really found their sound. There’s a thickness to their music that emerged after Teen Dream, and for me, it all started here with ‘Myth’.

The production on Bloom felt like another huge step up for the band at the time, which is wild considering how much of a leap Teen Dream had already been. ‘Myth’ was the perfect single to showcase it. The shimmering guitars, Legrand’s haunting vocals and the sheer scale of the song felt like Beach House taking everything they’d already mastered and making it somehow even bigger.

2) Master of None

Some people might recognise this song from The Weeknd sampling it on ‘The Party & The After Party’, or you might know it from Aziz Ansari’s show of the same name, Master of None. Regardless of either of those things, it’s an incredibly important song in the Beach House discography.

“Jack of all trades, master of none,” sings Legrand, which I’ve always found interesting because, over the years, Beach House would go on to become the masters of dream pop. In my opinion, no one else even comes close. There’s a magic to this song that I think much of their debut was reaching for, but this is the moment where everything really clicks. It stands out as the best song on that first record and, in many ways, paved the way for the incredible discography that followed.

1) PPP

This is, without a doubt, my favourite Beach House song. It’s one that only seems to get richer and richer as the years go by. I think I’ve thrown so much emotion and so much feeling into this song over the years. I’m usually a music-first, lyrics-second person, but the lyrics here are just so intelligently written.

Legrand speaks of skating on ice and doing figure eights, and I’ve always felt like she’s talking about love and relationships. There’s this idea that love can feel infinite, reflected in the figure eight and its resemblance to the infinity symbol, but at the same time, the ice could break at any moment and it would be her “mistake”. I don’t know exactly why those lyrics resonate with me so much. I think life is a bit like that. It reminds me of the movie Friendship, and although it’s not a perfect film, I think it says something about how we’re all one misstep away from cracking the ice and sinking.

Musically, the song is beautiful. The broken guitar parts always seem to be building towards something, and there are some really lovely chord progressions between the verses and choruses, before everything gives way to this transcendent outro that just soars. There are so many subtle changes as it builds: the progressively moving bassline, Legrand’s penetrating vocals, all these little details gradually pushing the song higher.

Then, in its final moments, the song seems to reduce itself back down to something much simpler. I’ve always thought there was something strangely full-circle about it. Those last few moments sound like they could have appeared on Beach House’s debut, and I find that incredibly euphoric. Having followed their journey as a band, this song somehow encapsulates all the growth that happened between their debut and Depression Cherry, while still retaining something of where they started.

There’s so much of what I love about Beach House contained in this one song. If you haven’t heard it, go and listen to it right now.

The 25 Best Beach House Songs, Ranked