Guitar-pop pair Best Coast soar on live-stream from Capitol Records rooftop

Anyone eager to see Best Coast over the past few months would have done well to look somewhere small. In February, days after revealing that they had completed an album, the Los Angeles-based guitar-pop band played at a number of cosy spots around Southern California, including the Echo in Echo Park and Pappy & Harriet's near Joshua Tree. A few weeks later, Best Coast travelled to Austin, Texas, for the annual South by Southwest festival, where the group knocked out nine cramped gigs in seven days.

The goal for these performances, known as underplays, was to build excitement ahead of California Nights, the band's first major label record after a string of indie efforts. But the shows were also demonstrating that Best Coast - who at their core pairs frontwoman Bethany Cosentino, 28, with guitarist Bobb Bruno, 42 - have outgrown the rooms they used to call home.

"I remember playing the Echo in 2009, just me and Bobb and a MiniDisc as our drummer," Cosentino recallsrecently. Returning to the packed club, now with a muscular five-piece line-up, "was, like, mind blown into infinity".

Surrounded by cameras, including one mounted on a drone and another live-streaming the performance online, Best Coast blazed through a set of fresh material for an audience of about two dozen people, most of them close to the group personally or professionally. (Harvest Records, the band's label, is a subsidiary of Capitol.) The high point, which Cosentino and Bruno had carefully planned, came when they hit the dreamy title track just as the sun dipped behind the hills that form a kind of psychic landscape in Best Coast's music.