Chanel Beads remains in the perpetual present on Your Day Will Come

When “hypnagogic pop” was coined by David Keenan to some controversy, the writer was describing a burgeoning tendency in lo-fi music being circulated through tape trading and the internet. Related (and conflated) developments like vaporwave went on to distinguish themselves aesthetically; however, each shared a basis in the refracted sounds and cultural detritus of the 80s which, as argued by genre pioneer James Ferraro, seeped into musicians’ unconsciousness during youth. Hence “hypnagogic,” an indeterminate zone between lucidity and slumber.

While vaporwave’s sample-based style involved a haunted, chopped-and-screwed pastiche of commercial fads like exotica and smooth jazz, hypnagogic pop eschewed collage for psychedelic songwriting and emotional earnestness. As its millennial torchbearers have aged out, though, Keenan’s description of hypnagogia as a “memory of a memory” of pop underwent continuous refraction, a chain of dissipation where locus of inspiration dissolves into unexperienced history.

On Your Day Will Come, Chanel Beads' second LP (and, not insignificantly, their second album with the name), these movements are key to disentangling its sound. Still, as the title hints, they cannot exhaust the album’s approach. Among a younger cohort of artists steering hypnagogic pop today, the group tends to lack explicit homage to past cultural memory. This emulation of lo-fi vagueness is born from a digitised home studio rather than the aughts’ cassette recordings à la Ariel Pink – themselves inspired by the 80s experimental underground’s analogue production, revived when faced with the CD era’s effacing gloss.

Instead of embracing past artifice or outmoded recording techniques, Chanel Beads’ approach is less placeable. The collective sense of blurred linear time in the post-pandemic age pervades this sound, contained within the perpetual now rather than its musical reimagination of the past; the disconnect from reality into an ephemeral, virtual sphere is no longer speculated but lived through in these songs. Here, chorus and verse tend to waft along at consistent mid-tempo pulses. The ethereal, androgynous vocals read as cyborg-like and mediated, as if midi were humanised. Even when Shane Lavers’ staccato delivery on tracks like “Song for the Messenger” approaches the anthemic, it withholds cathartic resolution in favor of uncanny sublimation.

These vocal modes punctuate much of the tracklist, buoyed by drums on “Outside Your Life” that could be pulled from a George Clanton record. Airy rather than dense, their somnolent haze allows some glimmer to seep through in the glitz and harp-like arpeggiations of “Tyler Richard” and “Spirit Showing” respectively. Miraculously, this artificiality is sincere, non-evasive.

On one such occasion in the chorus of “The Coward Forgets His Nightmare”, Lavers pleas “I thought I saw you smiling in all my memories,” dredging up temporary comfort from a questionably-existent past while the titular phrase chastises one’s drowsy-yet-intentional forgetfulness. Between alertness and sleep, our continually evaporating moment is morphed into the source of tense longing. Your Day Will Come is not the future of pop or rock, but nothing yet sounds this much like the present.