"Music is a weird thing," says Mat McHugh. "If you're doing it right, you're only trying to respect the spirit of it, but it seems that every step in making it is a compromise of ego and industry. Maybe you never actually get there. Maybe music is the halfway point between heaven and hell."

Welcome to the Beautiful Girls' latest songs: divinely inspired and realized by human hands; magnificent monuments to unattainable perfection. Ziggurats.

These... more