It has been years since Beach House have written a love song. That is mostly because they have grown used to writing music concerned only with the existence of the music itself. Their first two albums had suggested this tendency, as they established delicate and obscured dream pop as their methodology, using general lyrics and exhibiting a degree of awe at each track’s mere existence. But ever since joining with producer Chris Coady on their breakout album Teen Dream, any looseness or sloppiness has been removed from their recordings, and Beach House tracks have been pared back to totemic statements of glistening beauty – landscapes of cut glass and sheer white light, vast images of perspective and construction.

The culmination of this was 2012’s Bloom, which featured a cover solely depicting light bulbs in a grid pattern, providing the most perfect visual metaphor for the music’s structural arrangement. Bloom was an album of impeccable spectral beauty, but also of unnerving regularity and a distinct absence of any physical presence.

Depression Cherry has arrived instead with a cover of deeply textured crimson and a low quality leak which has served to dampen the sparkling high frequencies we have come to expect in Beach House’s music. In their place is both a hint of the humanity found in Devotion and their self-titled debut, and a re-engineering of the crystalline perfection that marked their last two albums.

The most immediately striking difference is in the songwriting itself. On Bloom it was hard to find a single chord change that didn’t lie on a firm and steady beat and reaffirm the regular consonance of the track. Depression Cherry's opening track ‘Levitation’, by contrast, enters with a thin drone, pivoting and twisting around it with notably light and brisk harmonic movement, then pushes it into a lopsided groove. Finally it collapses, on an offbeat of all things, into a muscular chorus. Following this is lead single ‘Sparks’, a modern shoegaze anthem, which uses organs straight from Devotion in a slightly sour, uncomfortable way through its first half. It signals an intent to draw out a degree of tension in the harmony that has previously been deeply missing. These first two tracks are some of the most absorbing material Beach House have ever released.

That isn’t to say these new tracks aren’t utterly beautiful, but this beauty is used in different ways. Most tracks only achieve a truly expansive scale by their end, as these songs are no longer structured monolithically. They have a habit of presenting themselves awkwardly before revealing their parts in new and sometimes extraordinary contexts – ‘Sparks’ opens with a breathed, digitally treated vocal part and a searing guitar lead straight out of angry, anxious My Bloody Valentine. The two parts are allowed to interplay with each other as the chorus collapses in on itself, before streaking out to the stars as the track breaks apart. Similarly, as the sparse ‘10:37’ evolves, an obnoxiously old-school and nostalgic strings patch births Alex Scally’s guitar to allow the track’s second half to emerge. The shine they have used so much is now only a waypoint in each track’s progression rather than their sole focus. For all of its quietness compared to Bloom’s bombast, Depression Cherry has a far greater sense of dynamic and flow and ends up sounding the grander album for it.

In that ability to progress and change, Depression Cherry finds its thematic core. All of these songs revolve around the weaknesses and absences in their structure. These are elements, like the painful cluster into which the opening drone of ‘Levitation’ morphs, the naked final chorus of ‘10:37’, or the mournful vocal harmonies of ‘Bluebird’, that simply could not have existed in Beach House’s past output. Victoria Legrand’s lyrical content takes this forward, with each song describing fragile or absent relationships. To a degree, the particular lyrics matter less than the unified mood of simmering tension and anxiety that pervades this album. It has a far more nuanced tone than the blast of spectacle offered on Bloom.

There are some missteps, though. Despite having an achingly pretty one-line chorus and bearing all the structural hallmarks of the best parts of the album, ‘Space Song’ is crippled by one of their most turgid and inane lead guitar lines. Both ‘Beyond Love’ and ‘Wildflower’ forget to actually become songs, and their lack of structure undermines the rest of the album’s subtle trick.

Depression Cherry’s balancing act is a complex one. The album still bears the marks of Chris Coady’s production with a distinct lack of mid-range and visceral impact. All of these songs are deeply pretty, and risk focusing attention onto superficial elements. However, in having the confidence to undermine this artifice for small moments, Beach House have found a way to communicate the emotional content of the album. Their understanding and control over their form and craft has never been stronger. Maybe they still haven’t written any love songs, but they have finally written some songs about love; and when they get it right, those songs are mesmerising.

@regresssion