“What genre are you?” is a question that Brooklyn band Chanel Beads are asked often, most recently by a lighting tech on the set of a recent music video shoot.
Helmed by singer-songwriter/producer Shane Lavers, 29, Chanel Beads is an esoteric musical project that exists at the intersections of ambient electronic, sophisto-pop, field recordings, and top 40, executed with impressionistic ease. “The sound is captured, not made,” Lavers explains over brunch in the Silverlake neighborhood of Los Angeles.
Chanel Beads’ amorphous and collaged tracks feel like a hip-hop take on shoegaze, I say, and Lavers’ partner and musical collaborator Maya Collette, 26, excitedly replies, “As a philosophical approach to our music, it's a really great start.” It’s the band's unique voice and vision that has garnered them some underground traction in indie rock and electronic music circles alike. In the last two years the band has played with whos-who bands like Bar Italia while simultaneously lending their DJ skills to NTS radio shows. It’s fitting that Chanel Beads spans multiple music scenes; they’re untethered by genre, only limited by their own imagination.
Originally from Montana, Lavers moved to Seattle in 2016 and created a Soundcloud account, which hosted demos and iPhone voice memos and ultimately became Chanel Beads. The project took on several live iterations, including solo performances with samplers, which he admits were “very soundscape.” It was at one of these early shows that Collette first laid eyes on Lavers. “We found a picture where Shane had played at the house venue that I lived at. I'm in the crowd watching him perform. This is before we knew each other,” she recounts. They’d ultimately meet a year later and start performing together with myriad rotating musicians, most recently with Zachary Paul rounding out the group on violin.
It wasn’t until Lavers and Collette moved to Brooklyn in the fall of 2021 that the project really took shape. Lavers was listening to a lot of Joni Mitchell and ambient electronic music during this time and wasn’t sure how to marry his disparate tastes. “I would post the sound of a creek that I recorded on my phone or cut up a Justin Bieber song on free DJ software I pirated,” he says in between sips of his latte.
The first glimpse into the world-building that Chanel Beads would later perfect on their debut album Your Day Will Come, due April 19 via Jagjaguwar, can be found on their 2022 fan favorite “Ef.” It features the signature Chanel Beads sound that mixes Lavers’ high register male vocals with Collette’s lower register female vocals, creating a singular third voice that cuts through the band’s airy compositions. On “Ef” Lavers delivers lines like “want to hurt myself to heal you,” with a childlike innocence that creates an unsettling and perplexing listen. That’s intentional. “We always talk about how [the music] is supposed to always be uncanny and hard to describe,” Lavers explains. “Is it a band, is it an electronic project? Is it a woman singing? Is it a man?”
Their highly-anticipated debut delves into liminality, grief, and the inconsistency of memory — though Lavers mischievously adds, “They are all love songs. What's a song that isn't a love song?” Even diss tracks, it's like, ‘You want to dis me so bad. Why are you so obsessed with me?’” Their dreamy single “Idea June,” out today, is partially about being so in love with someone that nothing else matters. “I was also really interested in the idea of the natural world being kind of perceived through relationships as possessive.” He references It’s a Wonderful Life, when George Bailey talks about lassoing the moon for his wife to prove his love. “It is romantic to be like, ‘f*ck everyone else. It's just you and me.’”
Your Day Will Come has an open-ended feeling, sonically and lyrically. Songs seem improvised yet meticulously written, almost as if they were created as they were recorded, or like they had always existed. “People think that the music's really layered, but to me it is pretty simple, but labored over,” he says. Most of the tracks are brief and end unexpectedly, which Lavers explains is very intentional: “It's almost like right when you are going to finish your sentence, you retract it all.” He later adds, “This is very Midwestern of me, to try to hide the strength of emotions.”
Lavers doesn’t always hide from those strong emotions. The first single from the album, “Police Scanner,” is an avant-pop song about mourning the world. He explains that the title came from the idea of people listening to police scanners during protests. The song grapples with “watching f*cking unfathomable cruelty and just being passive to it then feeling guilt and shame,” he explains. The band felt this same feeling while touring last fall and simultaneously seeing the news about the hospital bombing in Gaza on October 17. “It’s like ‘why is the world still turning?’” Lavers says about the absurdity of moving forward with the mundanity of life while the world is in turmoil. It’s that frustration that impacts the album as a whole. “All of [the songs] are tinged with what can I do and what can't I do … What do I have the power to do?”
The answer can be found in “Urn,” the emotional highlight of Your Day Will Come. The track perfectly synthesizes the band’s skill at transforming playful language to reveal a complex aspect of loss. The band is not flippant about death, but they hold space for moments of levity in the way that only someone who has felt a deep loss can fully grasp. Lavers references the LCD Soundsystem song “Someone Great,” as an example of his take on grief. In that song James Murphy sings about the frustration of wanting the world to understand your loss, and yet they are able to laugh and enjoy a sunny day.
During our conversation, we keep going back to the idea of the in-between spaces of life, the transition points and the pressures and simultaneous ambivalence they can provoke. How our memories can change over time as we change. Album opener “Dedicated to the World” touches on the untrustworthiness of our own memories, and Lavers explains that degraded memories reveal something about ourselves by what we chose to remember.
“You're repainting the painting rather than restoring it,” he says. It’s a mission statement for their art. “Memories are not fact. The feelings linger longer than the details.”
