Your bio says that Bloom is meant to be experienced as an album, and offers a unified vision of the world. Can you talk about that vision and the lyrics of the new album? It sounds consistent with the last album, but calmer, and you can hear the lyrics more, so we're wondering what that change is about.

VL: Well, nothing has changed -- the way that we work, the way our process is, the way that we feel intensely about what we do, the fact that we're songwriters. We don't write hits. It's about real feelings and songs and craft. We're album lovers, which means that one of the first things we bonded over as people was a love of records. You like to get into records because they're beautiful. An amazing album from start to finish is a great experience. It could be your entire summer, it could be your year, it could remind you of some time in your life, it could be your future.

From our bio, which it seems like you are referencing mostly, that statement -- that this album is meant to be experienced as an album -- is just basically reiterating to someone who wouldn't know anything about us that what they're going to find is a group that cares very deeply about music and about songs. They're not going to get, you know, like, a Justin Bieber record that has two hits on it and then, like, eight confusing songs that make you feel like you need to take a shit.

My point is, we're repeating something we feel very strongly about. It's a record. Every song is there for a reason. There's nothing in the album that has been put there carelessly. It's a work, like a painting, not just songs slopped together. You can listen to it any way you want. We're not saying you have to listen to it from beginning to end. It's choice. You can love a song. It's not a dictatorial kind of thing, it's just an elegant statement of how we feel about what we do.

You wrote the majority of Bloom while on tour, right?

VL: No, we actually did not. We wrote the record in Baltimore.

How did being on tour for two years, that itinerant lifestyle and sense of transience, affect your songwriting for the new album?

VL: Well, do you know our music?

Yes.

VL: Have you been to any of our shows?

No.

VL: Okay. We've been a band since 2005, and touring was one of the first things we did before even really caring about being on a record label. Nowadays bands don't make a lot of money selling records. You make your living off of touring, and if you're doing it a lot and doing it right, you're busy, you're traveling, you're interacting with the music audience. Some people sit in an office, some people go to school, some people work in a field. Every human has a different way that they spend all of their time. We spend our time writing music, traveling, living, breathing, eating, doing this. This is our livelihood. For us to just say that touring is the reason why we make music -- it's not. It's everything combined, and music is the way that we express our experience.

When you combine six years of touring and over 500 shows in a career, at that point it's probably changed you in many ways, it's affected you. It's not like you're just sitting in a pasture. You're growing with your music, so it's a bit more complicated than that. Life in general changes you and affects you, so touring is part of that because it's part of our lives.

Teen Dream was your biggest album yet, how have your lives changed since it came out two years ago?

Alex Scally: We now play to bigger audiences, which is awesome some of the time, and also worse some of the time. It made us concentrate really intensely on our playing and presentation, but you also feel like you can't connect with some people in the back. We almost don't want to play bigger shows than where we are now. It's kind of perfect. The shows are the main way our lives have changed. We wrote this record the exact same way. We still live in Baltimore, where we started. We had the same practice space for this record that we've had for years. Not a lot has changed from the beginning, except for our own development as artists, and our own desire. We're not satisfied with a song that only has this [small motion] much emotion. We want a song that has a much bigger feeling in it.

Where does the title of the song "Lazuli" come from? 

AS: First of all, it's a gemstone.

VL: But the word itself can give me such a feeling-- looking at it, saying it. I fall in love with words. I felt like it had a real imagination to it. I had written it down a while ago and always thought I'd love for this word to be in the Beach House world. It was only a matter of time before the music of "Lazuli" was erupting. That word and the feeling completely merged and became one. It's not about the meaning, or the actual stone. "Irene" is another good example. People go, "Who's Irene?" It's like, "Well, c'mon. It's more crazy than that."

AS: Your mom. The answer is your mom. 

VL: But isn't it more interesting to feel many possibilities?

Reading about the last album, you used the words "blossoming" and "flowery" to describe the sound. Why did you choose to title this one Bloom? 

AS: It's funny that everyone's obsessed with the idea that it has to do with flowers because we thought it sounded dark. The word is like an object-- we were thinking "bloom," "doom." It encapsulated tons: the bloom, the end of the bloom, and then coming back the next year.

VL: It's more about the cyclical nature of all things.

AS: And the word "bloom" is much different than "grow." It implies something goes away, and stays that way. It is very temporary. If someone just sees it as happy flowers, I feel really sorry for them, because that's not what we want; I kind of wish it wasn't coming out in the springtime, because I don't want people to feel like that.

Do you know what algal blooms are? They are these terrible events that happen because all of these chemicals that pour out from the Mississippi into the Gulf of Mexico. The chemicals feed certain algae way too much, so the algae consume all of the oxygen in the water, and the water becomes anaerobic, and nothing can live in it. It's this deadly thing, and it's called an algal bloom. I don't know why I told you that.

VL: It's an example of opening the word, and not limiting oneself to one experience of the term. People put a lot of weight on album titles, but it's an open, abstract, sculptural thing. It's the same way when you title a painting-- you look at the painting, and you have the feeling the painting gives you.