BALTIMORE – This rehearsal space smells like a thrift store – which is to say it smells like dust and history and magic.

It’s an old warehouse where the drywall is draped in zebra-print bedsheets and Barbie-pink afghans. Victoria Legrand and Alex Scally of the ascendant indie-rock duo Beach House apologize for the mess – a charming clutter of bicycles and boom-boxes and tambourines and hula hoops.

“Having this space is, like, one of the greatest things in the entire world,” Scally says. He and Legrand sit surrounded by the arsenal of vintage keyboards and organs – more than 20 in all – used on the duo’s new album “Teen Dream,” one of the most anticipated indie releases of 2010.

The album, which arrived Jan. 26, is Beach House’s third – and its first for macro-indie Sub Pop Records. Built around Legrand’s luxuriant contralto, it’s a sumptuous, slow-moving affair that smudges the line between sensual warmth and melancholic cool.

But can a sumptuous, slow-moving album launch a band to stardom in today’s impatient indie-rock landscape? An appearance on “Late Night with Jimmy Fallon” and a performance at the Sundance Film Festival last month helped, but for an act with such a buzzed-about future, Beach House’s rehearsal space suggests musicians who spend their creative hours exploring an enchanted, forgotten past.

“We’re really obsessed with thrifting together,” says Scally of the platonic duo’s frequent junk-shop excursions. “Finding clothes and finding these organs, it’s a huge part of our sound. Using these crappy things and renewing them and loving them.”

Bruised synthesizers and rickety organs sputter and hum across the album, with Legrand’s androgynous mewl giving each song a slight erotic charge. “We know we can feel, awake and unreal,” she sings on “Lover of Mine,” evoking Fleetwood Mac swallowed up in a quicksand of glitter.

The video for “Lover of Mine” provides another visual entirely: a strange backyard wrestling match. “Teen Dream” was released with a bonus DVD of 10 videos the duo commissioned, one for each song.

The duo is much enjoying the roots they’ve put down in Baltimore.

“It’s a really good place to be inspired and work and get consumed by your own thoughts. It’s not like New York where there’s so much stimulation from everyone around you,” he says.

The two obviously care about their image but try to remain oblivious to the hype machine ramping up behind them.

“Hype always depends on having some kind of gimmick,” Scally says. “I don’t really think our music has that. … I don’t think it’s going to be this crazy, explosive thing.”

Still, the pair is ready to flirt with the heights reached by tour mates and friends Grizzly Bear and Fleet Foxes – breakout bands who have appeared on the latest “Twilight” soundtrack and “Saturday Night Live,” respectively.

Beach House quietly announced its own burgeoning ambitions last year by leaving Washington-based Carpark Records. Sub Pop’s Sue Busch, a super-fan who signed the duo, thinks Beach House is capable of staking its claim in the indie-rock wilderness.

“Even if they come from the same world as a lot of those other bands, they just infuse something that’s completely different,” Busch says. “Their music is almost sexy in a weird way that none of those bands are.”

Legrand isn’t concerned with where Beach House fits in the grand scheme.

“I like that people are just sort of confused,” she says of today’s music consumers. “That’s a really interesting place to be.”