Beach House at 20: Inside Victoria Legrand's French Film-Score Family Tree

October 2026 marks the 20th anniversary of the self-titled debut album by Baltimore dream-pop duo Beach House, the record that launched guitarist Alex Scally and singer/keyboardist Victoria Legrand into a catalog now spanning eight albums. Ahead of the anniversary, Far Out Magazine profiled the pair's backgrounds and pointed to something less well known: Legrand comes from a French musical dynasty. The outlet also noted that four of Beach House's last five albums have reached the US Top 20, commercial reach well beyond the indie scene the band started in.

From geology and drama school to Baltimore

The lo-fi 2006 debut is best remembered for the eerie, hypnotic single "Master of None." But neither founding member came up through the garage-band route, and both were already in their twenties when they started working together.

Scally studied at Oberlin College in Ohio — also the alma mater of Liz Phair and Karen O — though his major was geology, not music. Legrand studied drama at Vassar College in New York, then returned to France, where she was born, to train as an actor at the Jacques Lecoq International Theatre School in Paris.

Disillusioned with theater, she moved back to the US and settled in Baltimore, where Scally was working as a carpenter by day and making music on the side. In a 2008 interview with the Village Voice, Legrand said she never considered being anything other than