In writing about recent albums, I can sometimes lose sight of the simple fact that new bands aren’t always that new. (Unless the band has been around for ages, of course.) I go through a litany of comparisons to other songs and artists in trying to provide an approximation of the band’s sound, hobbled by the usual dancing-about-architecture shortcomings of scraping together shards of my limited vocabulary in the service of describing an art form that I find both transporting and so apart from my own skill set that it may as well be quantum metallurgy. In tapping out a review of the new Beach House album, I’m reminded by its very title that maybe agonized correlations aren’t always necessary.

7 is, as is implied, the seventh album from the Baltimore duo Beach House. And it sounds exactly like a Beach House album. Even as I write that, I’m wrenched by a pang of guilt at the reductive quality of the description, but it’s true. Although Beach House has gone through subtle, satisfying evolutions on every album in the twelve years since they released their self-titled debut, the core has remained the same. Rather than a sign of stagnancy, the consistency speaks to an admirable — and, given the quality of their music, completely understandable — purity of artistic vision. Victoria Legrand and Alex Scally developed a style that drew on some predecessors, but was immediately all their own, too. The music swirls and undulates and serves as a billowy cloud for Legrand’s airy, emotive singing.

The new album begins with “Dark Spring,” featuring music that moves like a stride picking up and singing that is like sunlight breaking through haze. It is elusive and immediate, soft and sharp, and all sorts of other contradictory textures merged into one. The same is true of the casually lush “Pay No Mind” and “Black Car,” which has a  burbling pulse that’s irresistible. Arguably, “Drunk in LA” achieves this magical intertwining most memorably, as it somehow manages to be both hypnotic and edgy as Legrand intones beautiful abstract poetry such as “Strawberries in springtime/ Pretty happy accidents/ My awareness that I’m lucky/ Rolling clouds over cement.”

Beach House even manage to avert the lapses into self-parody that can easily emerge when a band has been at the same basic approach for long enough. Ss if trying to triple underline the first word in “dream pop,” the track “L’Iconnue” features Legrand’s vocals layered into a small heavenly choir singing in French. And yet it works, coming across as sincere and exploratory rather than indulgent. On album closer “Last Ride,” which lasts precisely seven minutes, a spare piano leads into a slow sonic build that refuses to crest. It’s a feat of restraint and, by extension, confidence. And why wouldn’t they be operating with supreme certainty at this point? As 7 thrillingly reasserts, Beach House are no newcomers. They know what they’re doing.