For 17 years, Beach House have conjured the allure of ambiguity. In 2020, the duo went viral on TikTok with a video of a family “levitating” to 2012’s “Lazuli,” a visual gag that nonetheless evoked Victoria Legrand and Alex Scally’s unique ability to create sweeping cinematic visions with sound alone. (“It’s really weird we haven’t been asked to do [a soundtrack],” Legrand once said.) If Beach House ever made a movie, I imagine it would be in this vein: immortalizing the supernatural power of music to sustain human connection.

“Once Twice Melody” is the lead single and title track of the band’s self-produced eighth studio album, a series of four chaptered releases that form their most cinematic record yet. Working with a live string ensemble for the first time, they summon a sound more surrealistic than anything on 2018’s 7, bringing to mind 1960s psychedelia, Stereolab, and Broadcast’s “Come On Let’s Go.” “Once Twice Melody” sits confidently within the duo’s canon of dream-pop references: sun and shadow, gleaming synths, sirens like those found on 2018’s “L’Inconnue.”

In the lyrics, Legrand sings of a girl placated by her own imagination, basking in the faraway places constructed by a wandering mind. Juxtaposing prismatic visuals and lax vocals, the song evokes the sensual slowness of a hot summer day, of sinking into the grass with a paleta dripping in your hand. “Nights fly by in her mind/All along the boulevard/She tries to understand/A never never land,” Legrand sings, alluding to the picture-perfect world deep within this character’s memory. But as the jagged lines across the woman’s handheld mirror in the animated video suggest, those idealizations are never fully realized. It’s an abstract reflection of a message Beach House have intimated throughout their career: Idyllic moments never last as long as our daydreams.