Chanel Beads and the search for clarity

It’s felt in the androgynous vocals, sometimes a lullaby, sometimes a scream; the constantly shifting whirl of violins, disintegrating collages of sound and uncanny melodies. It creates a stirring intimacy which always threatens to collapse. Your Day Will Come, they promised on their 2024 breakthrough project. Your Day Will Come, here we are again. Their new album is like a recurring dream, a fracture in chronology. Wiser and wearier, Shane Lavers offers no answers but only more unsettling ambiguities.

Until he started making music under the name of Chanel Beads, Lavers felt he had been asleep his whole life. Raised in the suburbs of Minnesota, he moved to Seattle in 2016 where he spent long hours working at a library for the blind, taxonomising titles in braille with only the music in his ears for company across his eight-hour shifts. A strange flower started to grow in the dark. He started to create a collage of lo-fi audio rips and raw street recordings elevated with real instruments, a hallucination of pop music conjured from collective memory.

It was through performing in the basements of the Pacific Northwest as he took his first tentative steps as an artist that Lavers met Maya McGrory, the artist known as Colle. She became his partner and his vocal counterpart in Chanel Beads; her voice gossamer, his at white-knuckled breaking point. There began the central tension which makes their sound so compelling. Together, they moved to New York, and with the addition of violinist Zachary Paul the sketch became a complete picture.

Chanel Beads flourished in house parties, warehouses and illegal abandoned train tunnels. When there is an instinct in popular culture to expose, Shane Lavers obscures. The chiming warmth of “Ef” and the dream-fractured “True Altruism” both captivated and confounded the NYC scene; as the mythology around Chanel Beads grew, the more resistant to definition they became. Their first album Your Day Will Come offered no answers but only more questions. Is it a band, is it a duo? Is it a solo project? “We’ve always been ambiguous about that, and I like to continue to be because it isn’t anything really, it isn’t any of those,” Lavers offers.

When they released “Ef”, a rumour began that Chanel Beads were Swedish; the Pitchfork review of their first record noted their reputation for being “a sort of Drain Gang for the art school set”. So chimerical was their sound that after playing a show for Your Day Will Come (2024), someone DM’d them to tell them it was the worst show ever, they ruined their own record and, emphatically, they are not a punk band. “There was an entirely different band living in this guy’s head,” says Lavers. “And I thought it was a fun experience for me to be confronted with someone’s conception of Chanel Beads that was completely different from mine. This negative rupture was interesting to me, some ‘you don’t fucking know me’ attitude definitely made its way into the music.”

This instinct to refuse to play nicely bleeds into everything: the 2026 album’s doppelgänger title, the stone grotesque with a devious expression for its artwork (not a gargoyle, Lavers notes, because it doesn’t have a water feature) down to the childish vocal snarls that deface its sincerity and the sudden endings to songs as if they were caught in the act red-handed.

“I had the title before I really started to work on the record. I just knew to call it You Day Will Come again, partly because I was like, ‘This is the stupidest idea, it would piss people off, people who are trying to market it would be annoyed’ – and I thought that was kind of funny... It’s an unfortunate byproduct that it combines the two records. In my head, there’s not a continuation or evolution. I made another record, and I’ll make another one after this. I don’t know if they’re necessarily in conversation with each other so much as everything I’m making will be in conversation with itself.”

From Chanel Beads’ inception, Lavers has had a tendency to disrupt the algorithm and marketing logic. The cover for their first album, a cropped greyscale edit of a twentieth-century oil painting sees a crowd gather on a beach, enraptured by something happening just beyond the frame. It was artwork in the public domain, which their label advised them not to use because anyone could monetise it and print shirts of it for free. “I was like, ‘Well, that’s kind of cool. It’s everybody’s painting… I was wondering, when I wrote this album, if the songs I write for myself are different to the ones the listener gets. It becomes a product to be sold, something for a music website to write about. It becomes a product in all these ways that it almost feels stolen from you. But if it exists in these two different ways, does that lessen it? Is it still yours if it’s not yours at all?”

Chanel Beads’ second album was written not in this spirit of defiance but surrender. “While writing the songs I kept asking myself, ‘If you are really so hopeless, what does your life look like with that clarity?’” Lavers shares. For the world he felt despair, and yet, in his personal life, it was possible to find bursts of love and relief. He describes the two realities as being in almost aggressive confrontation. “I wanted to figure out why one wasn’t overcoming the other. How could I feel both of these so intensely? Like, are we living in hell, or is love enough?”

“Song for the Messenger” is a microcosm of what Lavers wrestles with across the album. His lyrics are feverish incantations dictated by a dream logic, cut with realisations about a narrowing future: “And the days still move and the window closes slowly”. As he was writing the album, he would walk for hours at night in Brooklyn listening to each idea on loop, a near-maddening dissection which would end with the clarity on where each track should go. “The song overtakes your life and it doesn’t stop until you’re done with it,” he says. “What I thought I was making is so far from what it has become. I thought this was an incredibly aggressive and depressive record, but there is a lot more light at the end of the tunnel than I realised.”

Then, he pauses to think again. Lavers talks cautiously, rationing his thoughts in a way that feels divided between self-protection – never losing sight of the fact this is an interview and the purpose of why he is doing it – and the fear of saying something embarrassingly sincere. “It’s something I’m still thinking about, and something I don’t really want to talk too much about. It’s not a simple cautionary tale. It was definitely one of the more autobiographical songs, but also something not to set in stone,” he says evasively.

When I ask him what has been weighing on him, he shrugs, “The hopelessness stuff is kind of complicated. It feels like, um… It’s hard to talk about without sounding like a pretentious 16-year-old. Sometimes it’s like you can live your life with one absurdity, but then if you stack one more then all of a sudden it becomes unbearable. It’s the state of the world and the idea that you have to keep going. I got obsessed with this idea of those fleeting moments where you think everything makes sense, and then the next moment you don’t know where that clarity went. The darkness in the songs came from feeling weighed down and the only way out being to feel even more weighed down.”

And in that sublimation, there is release. “I’ve been trying to articulate this – it’s almost a crushing feeling. And that’s kind of what the music is about,” he explains. “Your outcome is radically changed when you lean into it, and then you feel some kind of transcendence on the other side.”

Your Day Will Come is a search for clarity, the music and the lyrics an articulation for something that lies just beyond Lavers’ grasp. “There’s definitely a lot of grief stuff,” he says vaguely. “But I don’t like to talk publicly about it because I don’t want it to turn into like, I don’t know… I get a little allergic to marketing things when it comes to that.”

“Tyler Richard” breaks the tradition of a Chanel Beads song. When their titles are riddles, fragments of thought or cryptic phrases, “Tyler Richard” is a name – bluntly real. Built on an eerie whirl of 80s synths and bisected by a morass of distorted, almost demonic screams, it captures something of a waking nightmare. Lavers dedicated the first Chanel Beads EP Zut Alors to his older brother Tyler after his accidental death in 2010 from carbon monoxide poisoning. He wrote: “This EP is about how grief reshapes and morphs as each year passes, becoming increasingly mundane and ubiquitous.”  

“I’m not trying to be obtuse, but I just don’t want to talk about the lyrical meaning so much,” he says of the song. “The only thing I would say about it is if someone you know has passed away, you might have a dream where they’re still alive. Part of the dream is waking up and being forced to acknowledge again that they’re really gone.” He tried to make the track sound like a “Broadway musical number” in the extremity of its dramatics, almost to distract from the grief that persisted beneath: “Don’t whisper in my ear I can’t hear you / Got this life in my fingers can I give you”

I ask him if writing music about loss helps you deal with it. “No,” he says bluntly. “Well, maybe that’s not true. What I want out of it, I don’t think I’m getting. It feels cathartic in the sense that it’s nice to be able to talk about what you’re struggling with, but the catharsis I’m personally looking for I can’t find when I put it into music. But then that’s what compels me to keep making it. Maybe the impossible will happen, or something.”

Someone once told Lavers that every song he writes is a love song; even a song of grief is just an expression of love with no one there to receive it: “I don’t know if that makes sense, but there’s definitely a lot of hoping that love could be unconditional or universal. It’s fun to put songs in like that which expel any of the nastiness in yourself,” he says. On the last day before it was pressed to vinyl, Lavers changed the track ordering because he worried it sounded too bleak; he wanted it to begin on a note of vulnerability. This softness is how he smuggles in the stories we find hard to sit with.

As deeply personal as Chanel Beads is to Lavers, one of its many contradictions is that this quality is found in the contributions of others. Casual jam sessions led to contributions from friends like Tchad Cousins of Urika’s Bedroom, More Eaze, Anastasia Coope, and Bella Litsa. “Dust in the Wind” marks the first co-write from someone outside of Chanel Beads’ core trio, a joint effort between Lavers and Isaac Eiger of Strange Ranger and Threshold. Everyone who worked on Your Day Will Come they had toured with, forging an accelerated connection on the road and a deep, mutual respect for their musicianship. “It was exciting opening up to people,” he says. “I think it felt nicer, when I think about the lyrics I was writing, for the songs to be less just me.”

McGrory wrote a song entirely herself which became Lavers’ favourite on the record. “Silver Cup” floods with light, a catharsis that feels hard-earned from that crushing sublimation he was so fascinated by. They have been working together for nearly eight years. “She’s got the best taste of anyone I know,” he says. “Her taste is so good we’ve been able to fuck with each other’s ideas, and that’s mostly because of my confidence in her judgement. If she thinks something is really good but I’m not sure of it, then I will usually find the soul of that thing later. And the most fun part is when she doesn’t get it – then it makes me want to work really hard to get it to a place where it makes sense to her.” Many things are “Maya’s idea”, such is the borderless exchange of perspectives which define Chanel Beads.

For the album’s artwork, Lavers originally wanted to use The Witching Hour by Andrew Wyeth. The painting depicts an empty dining room. A bare table is surrounded by black wooden chairs, and a candle chandelier casts shadows on the ceiling while the flames dance in an invisible breeze. The windows are shut. The fear lies not in what is portrayed, but what lives just beyond the frame. When the clearing for the artwork proved too difficult, Lavers chose the small grotesque he salvaged from an antiques shop. “It’s just this fucked up little guy who’s here to protect you, and I think that captures the playful, evil attitude of the music. He’s also got eye boogers,” he says. “He’s kind of pitiful, which is what I like too.”

I ask Lavers what he thinks he has learned on the other side of Your Day Will Come, the second clause in a discography that is an endless run-on sentence of unfinished thought. “Maybe I’ve learned all the wrong lessons,” he shrugs. “In this career you feel pushed into being selfish and precious about yourself to the point it feels counterintuitive to the music you’re making and feeling okay as a person. I think that conflict is compelling, and I’m still figuring it out. You’ve just got to keep going, keep adding weight until something gives.”