Aziz Ansari once used Beach House tickets as bait to ask a girl out. As he recounts in his new, surprisingly sober dating manifesto, Modern Romance, four years ago, he spent a night making out with a woman he calls “Tanya” while listening to the Baltimore dream-pop duo’s music. Looking for a sly way to lure her on a proper date, he noticed Beach House were playing the area and mustered up the courage to send her a text invite that almost ended up sounding like a haiku. She never responded, but the experience—and his overall fascination with romance at a time when Seinfeld-ian social codes have become dictated by Twitter, social media hashtags and other technological constraints—did inspire his hit Netflix series. And, when he needed to figure out a clever way to encapsulate his utterly modern look at emerging adulthood, he chose another Beach House song with limited-character precision as the title of his series: Master Of None.

“I found out when we were asked if we would allow the song to be used on the show. It was cool to see another nod to the song by eventually noticing that the entire show was called Master Of None,” says Beach House singer Victoria Legrand, who co-wrote the number for their 2006 self-titled debut and has already seen “Master Of None” sampled by the likes of Canadian R&B hero The Weeknd. “We’ve never discussed the song directly with Aziz. It’s OK for there to be some mysteries—not everything needs to be transparent. That’s a 21st-century problem—transparency and how to fucking deal with that.” (Ansari also conceived an episode, which was based on the experience of using tickets as a backdoor way to ask someone out on a date, with Analyze Phish creator and Parks And Recreation producer Harris Wittels, who passed away before the series was completed.)

Beach House have certainly learned how to master 21st-century problems, or at least expectations, during the past year. Though sultry-voiced, French-born singer Legrand and equally breezy guitarist Alex Scally have remained indie darlings since emerging from Baltimore’s neo-psychedelic indie-pop scene a decade ago, they remained relatively quiet following the tour behind their second Sub Pop release, 2012’s Bloom— until they finally dropped their fifth album, Depression Cherry, this past August. That album not only marked their longest break between releases, but also served as a welcome return to the duo’s original, more stripped-down, drum-machine-infused sound, while still featuring enough lavish flourishes to comfortably avoid overused retro or DIY tags. Then, just a few weeks after Depression Cherry hit the digital marketplace, Beach House announced the imminent release of a second full-length, Thank Your Lucky Stars, which they described as “not a companion to Depression Cherry, or a surprise, or B-sides.”

“They are truly two separate albums, written one after the other in 2014,” Legrand points out between record release dates this fall. “We knew we wanted Depression Cherry to come out first, in the traditional manner. The spirit of Thank Your Lucky Stars told us it didn’t want the same kind of release. It wanted something more immediate, punk and innocent, which we believe is what happened. We wanted everyone to get it at the same time. And we also knew that we didn’t want to wait to put out the second album and play by the so-called ‘rules.’ We really wanted to be able to play the Thank Your Lucky Stars songs on tour, while playing the Depression Cherry songs—we wanted it to be more fresh and exciting for the artist as well as the fans.”

Until the mid-‘60s, when LPs functioned more as singles collections than grand artistic expressions, it was actually common for bands to release multiple albums a year. Though, these days, Irish twin releases usually come with some sort of asterisk. And, while Beach House initially thought that releasing their second album of the year only nine days after announcing its existence would be a nod to their indie roots, the duo unexpectedly found themselves defending their back-to-back albums.

“We had no intention of the nature of the release becoming a marketing scheme,” she admits. “We wanted to be as straightforward about it as possible but still maintain the excitement. That’s actually quite a difficult thing to do these days. Most things feel so full of ulterior motives now—the whole midnight drop, surprise thing is becoming another boring industry novelty. Thank Your Lucky Stars just wanted to exist in a pure and innocent way. And that seems like an impossible thing to have these days—to have something just exist artistically on your own terms is kind of a battle. The commercial vortex is always trying to get the art into bed with it. You really have to have your own identity and fight for what you want and how you want it to be ‘cause stuff always gets twisted this way and that.”

The band is also quick to emphasize that, despite a slightly longer break between albums, they really only had a few months of downtime. Beach House toured behind Bloom into September of 2013 and, by February, Legrand and Scally were already holed up in their practice space “getting obsessed again.” They finished writing Depression Cherry in the summer of 2014 and Thank Your Lucky Stars in November 2014. However, the group’s relaxed ethos during the recording sessions rubbed off on the albums, and both records possess a stately grandeur and the relaxed feel of a band that has comfortably aged past buzz-band status.

“There was definitely no question of the band existing,” Legrand says, shutting down any whispers of inner-band turmoil. “For me, personally, it was about allowing nothingness to occur—to allow things to be as natural as possible. I wouldn’t try to force myself to do anything. The question was: Will the music come again? Sometimes the process is about not aggressing it and having this very positive energy instead of a force constructing things, which is not constructive.”

Despite their commercial success on and off the road, Legrand and Scally have stayed true to their Mid-Atlantic roots. In certain ways, their decision to remain in Baltimore instead of relocating to Los Angeles, New York or even “music cities” like Austin, Texas or Nashville, Tenn., is reflective of their evolution as a band in general, too. Beach House have gradually expanded their live ranks to include drummer Graham Hill and Fleet Foxes alum Skyler Skjelset on bass and keyboards, yet the group’s sound is still rooted in the same, shore-gazing bliss that helped shepherd in the beachy, indie-pop revival they’ve become synonymous with.

“We have accumulated a lot of experience at this point and been in several different kinds of recording scenarios—from a basement to bedrooms to studios, we’ve pretty much done everything, and we’ve done it in three professional studios during Teen Dream, Bloom and now [these albums],” Legrand says. “There were certain things that we did during the Bloom recording that I had no particular interest in repeating. But ultimately, doing something when you want to do something is a lot better than just forcing things, one after another.”

Though Bloom was a commercial success and their first Top 10 hit, peaking at No. 7, Legrand and Scally feel that the album moved their lo-fi sound a little too far left from their “natural tendencies.” That change was partially a result of the large clubs, theaters and festivals the band found themselves headlining in the wake of Teen Dream’s success. They both felt that those larger rooms called for a more bombastic, full, rock sound with a full drum kit, but once they returned home from the Bloom tour, Legrand found herself looking for a more intimate space.

“The experience of touring has definitely been a learning experience that’s taught us everything—about songs, arrangements and being a band,” she says. “The core of this band—drum machine, keyboard, guitar and organ—the skeleton, is always being explored and being altered slightly. We’re experimenting, we’re removing things and we’re stretching things. We’re always playing with those ingredients. But Bloom was written in a very short period of time. It was a very intense period and then, at the end of the writing, we brought in the drums and we were writing the drum parts into the songs so that the songs took on this particular energy. It was almost as if the arrangement of the song would feel totally different if the drums weren’t there—that frequency.”

She pauses to carefully consider her words: “We didn’t even think about it; it was just a natural thing. It also took a big part of the recording process, during that record, and having done that, we deeply learned about what drums can do—they just take up a lot of space. They dominate. Being in that world during the writing, the touring and all of that—and hearing that frequency—we just felt like we had taken it to a final point. We had no interest in going further in that direction.”

Given their mindset going into the new sessions, it’s no surprise that Depression Cherry opens with the gentle tapping of a drum machine on the aptly named “Levitation.” The duo also emphasizes that they never brought a drummer into the writing process and crafted the skeletons of both albums themselves, a twist that “reclaimed levels of space and imagination and freedom in the songs.”

Looking back on their formative years, Legrand and Scally feel that their early lineup was “too tight” and have enjoyed exploring more subtle variations, both in terms of the songwriting and live arrangements. When it came time to start work on their new albums, the group wrote Depression Cherry and Thank Your Lucky Stars in Baltimore and then, recorded both albums at Studio in the Country in Louisiana.

“Because we had so many songs, we tried to approach the recording process as naturally as possible—recording a song whenever we felt like it, giving each song as much love as it needed,” Legrand says. “Also, I’d sing each song when I felt like it and was ready to record the vocals. That helped me get into each number as much as it needed. We didn’t want to be stodgy about it. I can see from the industry and outsider perspective how it’s three years between Bloom and these albums. But for us, the artist who tours and is doing it day in and day out, time is a whole different perspective.” Though early reviews described Thank Your Lucky Stars as Depression Cherry’s darker, more politically charged, slightly younger brother, she is also quick to laugh off those qualifiers. “Darkness is different from every eye, mind and heart,” Legrand says. “The reason we have two albums is because they immediately felt different from one another. So, it was obvious from the beginning of the writing process, their unique qualities from one another. In the studio, while recording both albums, it became even more apparent—the different feelings and stories. Thank Your Lucky Stars as [compared to] Depression Cherry, to me, is more raw, punk and immediate. Songs like ‘Elegy to the Void’ and ‘One Thing’ have such different energies and imagery and intensity than anything on Depression Cherry. There are more human issues in there that may seem ‘dark’ to someone, or to someone who just lives in some kind of bubble. Personally, I prefer it when the sun starts to go down. It is my favorite time of day.”

She catches her breath and emphasizes a very modern problem: “It’s no easy feat making two albums, but we did it and I’m so glad we did.”