Chanel Beads

First things first: yes, Chanel Beads’ second album, Your Day Will Come, has the same title as the experimental project’s 2024 breakthrough debut. But this is a completely new body of work, not a “part two,” a rehash or a re-do. If his initial impulse was to poke fun at the apparatus that divides music into chapters, as the songs developed, Shane Lavers found the phrase carried deeper nuance, evoking the duel between certainty and doubt that preoccupied his psyche. Though the phrase unfurls with conviction, a slight shift in emphasis can inspire unsettling ambiguities: Will your day come? What will it be like? How can you be sure? 

Raised in the suburbs of Minnesota, Lavers began making music under the name Chanel Beads while living in Seattle back in 2016. When he wasn’t working at a library for the blind, he was collaging synthetic sounds and real instruments into beguiling songs fundamentally averse to genre. He was living in New York by 2022, as tracks like “Ef” and “True Altruism” captivated certain online circles with their androgynous vocals, uncanny artifice, and stirring intimacy. In the years since Chanel Beads’ entrancing introduction, the project has gone from playing house shows and illegal abandoned train tunnel shows, all the way up to supporting Lorde on her recent North American arena tour.

Though the stages have grown larger, the spirit of Chanel Beads remains steadfastly underground. Lavers made Your Day Will Come at his small and sparsely furnished Brooklyn studio, with the speakers positioned so close to his face that he could feel air emit from every thump of the kick drum. He embraces the attitude of “if it works, leave it be,” recording into whatever microphone is around and going off that version. “We start the recording before the song is written, and then you work the song into the recording,” Lavers says. “We don’t make demos, that's a hard and fast rule. Which we’ll break eventually.”

Lavers’ fragmented lyrics are full of open-ended questions, exploring the dichotomies that inform our reality. He was particularly consumed by the coexistence of nihilism and love, saying, “It feels as if one should obliterate the other, but they don't.” Emotional sublimation is central to Chanel Beads, as if you can white-knuckle something so hard that it becomes transcendent. Drawing from Lavers’ own experiences, Your Day Will Come uses dream logic to delve into liminality and precarious remembrance. It’s colored by the spectres of specific losses, but also how you can haunt yourself by falling back into old habits.