Description
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?
These dualities were top of mind when Lavers wrote “Song for the Messenger,” the track that properly introduces Your Day Will Come’s expanded vision. Like the majority of the album, it was made as Lavers adjusted to life as a full-time musician. Thoughts had more room to bounce around and curdle inside his head, and he often felt dulled down by a world that can feel absurdly cruel. On “Song for the Messenger,” the future collapses into itself as “the days still move and the window closes slowly.” “While writing the songs I kept asking myself, ‘If you are really so hopeless, what does your life look like with that clarity,’” Lavers says.
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.
The second iteration of Your Day Will Come catalogues a sonic shift and evolution in Chanel Beads’ sound. This time around, it’s layered with more original parts and players. Violinist Zachary Paul has a greater presence, though Lavers continues to toy with the semiotic baggage of plug-ins. The gossamer voice of Maya McGrory can once again be heard across the album, and she co-wrote the majestic “Silver Cup.” These 14 songs are increasingly fleshed out and structured, a result of a more collaborative approach that embraced spontaneity and imperfections. Casual hangs led to contributions from friends like Tchad Cousins (Urika’s Bedroom), Mari Maurice (More Eaze), Anastasia Coope, and Bella Litsa. “Dust in the Wind” is a joint effort with Isaac Eiger of Strange Ranger and Threshold, marking the first co-write from someone outside the core trio of Lavers, McGory, and Paul. Neither a solo project nor a band, Chanel Beads is “defined by the negatives,” says Lavers.
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. Snarling beasts and shame accompany proclamations of devotion on “JBL in the Fireplace”: “That’s when they set the dogs on you/Fuck this world I still have love for you.”
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. The elegiac centerpiece, “Tyler Richard,” is haunted by the ‘have we met before?’ sensation. Initially gentle and twinkling, each verse draws into a tighter fist until it bursts open in ecstatic despair. “It’s about the feeling when someone who has passed appears in a dream, and you wake up and have to remember that they are gone,” Lavers says. “As your life moves forward, grief can recur in these ways that feel like time flattens and circles back in on itself.”
“I thought I saw you smiling in all my memories,” Lavers spits on the gleefully caustic “The Coward Forgets His Nightmare.” “It’s hard to dedicate yourself to art and not also indulgently dedicate yourself to yourself,” he says. “To me, that one is explicitly about reaching the end of your life, having lived in music, and wondering if you did the wrong thing.” As the veil falls on the present, you look back on a past littered with lost futures.