Bloom

Beach House began writing Bloom in Baltimore in March 2011. Legrand said they had at least thirty ideas and ten made the record. Wild, the earliest song, was written while Teen Dream was being mixed, and Myth and Troublemaker were written on 24 October 2011. They recorded at Sonic Ranch in Tornillo, Texas, over nine weeks, three times as long as Teen Dream, on 24-track analog tape and with their own instruments, having liked the area while staying at a motel in El Paso on tour. The complex had almost exactly the same dimensions as Dreamland. Chris Coady produced, engineered and mixed, Daniel Franz played drums, and extra vocals went down at Magpie Cage in Baltimore. Four field recordings link songs, one of them a flock of coyotes. The hidden track, Wherever You Go, was written during the Teen Dream sessions.

They said they wanted the record to share a vision with Pet Sounds, Disintegration and Violator, and Scally explained the title as bloom and doom in one word: the bloom, the end of the bloom and coming back the next year. They turned down a deal to sell the album at Starbucks. The record leaked in February 2012, Myth was a free download on 7 March, and NPR Music streamed the album on 6 May. It debuted at seven on the Billboard 200 with 41,000 copies, topped the independent and alternative charts and reached fifteen in Britain. Myth was certified gold in 2023. Videos for Lazuli, Wild, New Year and Wishes followed, the last directed by Eric Wareheim and featuring Ray Wise, and the short film Forever Still, made in El Paso and Tornillo, took Pink Floyd's Live at Pompeii as its model.

Lindsay Zoladz of Pitchfork, who gave it Best New Music, called the songs luminous and sky-sized and wrote that Legrand and Scally sound in perfect sync. Maddy Costa of The Guardian wrote that nothing happens to shatter the perfect surface. Pitchfork placed it seventh among 2012's albums.