7 CASSETTE

The joke of 7 is that Beach House brought in Sonic Boom specifically to speed up a band famous for moving at the pace of cooling glass, then still spent eleven months and several studios finishing it. Alan Moulder mixed, touring drummer James Barone finally got to play real drums on record, and the slowness paid off: Pitchfork handed it an 8.9, plenty of critics called it the duo's best album, and it reached number 20 on the Billboard 200 and 16 in the UK.