Since I’ve switched to Apple Music for streaming in 2022, it has been very insistent that the most appropriate autoplay selection for whatever album I’ve just finished is Beach House. And not just any Beach House song, but almost always “Space Song”. Sometimes “Myth”, sometimes “Silver Soul”, but most often is “Space Song”, and I’ve never understood why. Sure, I like Beach House and have a nominal selection of their albums saved to my library, and sure a lot of music I listen to is dreamy with female vocals and certainly Beach House adjacent, but I almost never deliberately listen to Beach House anymore because I hear those unbidden Yamaha keyboard arpeggios so so often.
And why? I remember when Depression Cherry came out in 2015, it was kind of a deliberately low-key release after the breakout success of Bloom, and I remember it more for the fact that the follow-up – Thank Your Lucky Stars – dropped just two months after it came out. How did the only single end up one of their signature songs? Well, this morning MusicRadar answered the question I never actually bothered asking out loud.
The article gets into the creative dry spell the duo found themselves in after the end of the exhausting Bloom touring cycle, and how they crafted the song down to the chord progressions and gear used (though Fender Stratocaster and Yamaha PS-20 is hardly revelatory, what with being what was used on pretty much every Beach House song). More revealing, to me at least, is the fact that the song is a TikTok hit. TikTok is an internet red line for me, so I have never seen or heard the song in that context, so it explains a lot. Hey Apple Music algo, stop trying to make me aware of what the kids are doing. I do not care.
Victoria Legrand talked about the TikTok phenomenon with Pitchfork in 2022, circa Once, Twice, Melody:
I’ve been watching a lot of TikToks set to “Space Song.” Vic, what do you make of all this?
VL: It’s like this comet that’s doing its own thing, that’s super fun and ridiculous. It’s also beyond our ability to control or understand, and that is relaxing to me. I am definitely a child of chaos, and something that calms me is understanding that there’s beauty in chaos, but you have to let go. I have never tried to understand “Space Song” and I don’t want to. You respect it and you leave it alone.
Beach House Are Still Surprising Each Other @ Pitchfork
There was no video released for the single, not even a moving graphic “visualizer”, but of course there are a million fan-made videos and TikToks. I will not be posting them.
Instead, here’s a great-quality live performance from Pitchfork Paris in 2018:
Worst thing is now I feel like listening to Beach House and the algorithm has won.
