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At first Shane Lavers can’t get through. Then he’s on video call but I cannot speak. When we finally make a clear connection over the phone, I can hear that he’s surrounded by nature, with faint snatches of birdsong at the edge of his measured, slightly gravelly speech. The musician who performs both in and as Chanel Beads (it remains unclear even to its core members whether they’re a band or a solo project) is on location shooting a music video somewhere on the coast of North Carolina. Encountering him as a disembodied voice, never mind one competing with worldly twittering and chirping, somehow feels more fitting than it would for most other musicians.
For years, Lavers has honed in on a cryptic, panoramic sound that ricochets from catchy, shout-along rock music to flare-ups of dissonant experimental noise. If the typical payoff of a pop song is to encapsulate a clear emotional arch in three-minute, verse-chorus structures, the appeal of a Chanel Beads track is much more unwieldy. Earlier singles such as Ef, Police Scanner and Male Friendship flicker in and out of focus, establishing a ground-floor of groove, only for Lavers and his bandmates to upend it with swelling strings, chiming guitar and ear-splitting samples. Lyrically, his songwriting gathers around an unstable emotional core that is so dense in its unspoken feeling that it manages to achieve an aching kind of orbit. It’s Lavers’s great talent to handle all of that swirling intensity while keeping everything suspended in the air.
Lavers’s intricate, off-kilter music has made him a hero of New York’s indie rock scene and to scores of young artists online who personalize their take on the genre with both messy and finely tuned post-production. But it’s his knack for writing massive, anthemic hooks that has given the band considerable attention in the world of mainstream pop. Billie Eilish has shouted out Chanel Beads, Rosalía has posted their music, and last year they played as an opening act on Lorde’s Ultrasound world tour. Even as his subject matter has remained resolutely threatening and obscure, Lavers’ increasingly accomplished records have made him a prime contender to be the next white boy rock crossover on the same trajectory as Cameron Winter or Mk.gee.
In some sense, the band’s sophomore album, Your Day Will Come – not to be confused with their debut of the same name – is the fullest culmination of their sound to date, their biggest, boldest and most emotionally impactful record yet. But even as their mission has clarified, the band’s mode of operating has remained as elusive as ever. If anything, Your Day Will Come is even more certain about the way that Chanel Beads handles overwhelming uncertainty. “I think I’ve lost some of the youthful arrogant confidence,” Lavers says, “and adopted a bit more confidence with [the] humility of … never [capturing an idea] perfectly because it always escapes me.” He pauses slightly. “I’m a little bit more comfortable with the thing I’m trying to do being just out of my grasp, like maybe eternally.”
“Pop music at its most transgressive when it’s about ‘the feeling that’s too big’,” saysWendy Eisenberg, Lavers’s friend and former tourmate. “We go to pop forms because the feeling is then big enough to be handled by the collective and I feel like [Lavers] has a real lock on that. He can transmute whatever it is that he’s [going through] into something that sounds like a rallying cry for a lot of people who also can’t yet say the exact same thing.”
Chanel Beads has indeed been reaching more massive crowds and triggered feelings of deep recognition. The transition from smaller gigs, where it’s easier to play to a room, to full-blown arenas has also been met with interesting lapses between his sense of the music and his audience’s. “A lot of people will come up and be like, ‘This music is so hopeful and it makes me feel like things are going to be OK,’” he says, “and to me I feel like the opposite.” I’m not surprised that people find Chanel Beads’ music to be reassuring. On a very surface level, the effect of Lavers and co-vocalist Maya McGrory’s harmonies are gorgeous; their seamless vocals somehow manage to sound both wide-eyed and world-weary at the same time.
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But it’s the subtle, underlying conflictedness that makes the band’s music land so powerfully. As a producer, Lavers has a formidable command of the sonic field, so that the band’s bigger, windswept musical gestures are made all the more impactful with the most minute sonic detailing possible. Often the work he puts in on his laptop is so radically different from the process of recording that his collaborators are frequently amazed at the finished product. “He really fucks with all the shit I record,” says Zachary Paul, who plays strings and forms the group’s third regular member, with a laugh. “There’s a lot of times when I actually hear the final track I’m actually not sure what’s me and what’s him and I’ll even ask, ‘Did I play that?’ and sometimes I’m really surprised.”
Lavers’ innovation also extends to the band’s use of sampling. At roughly three-quarters into new song Outside Your Life, some stock audio of a man sobbing enters into the mix in a way that seems like it’s both mimicking and mocking the catharsis of the lyrics. “I always think, ‘There could be a guitar solo here or there could be something that functions like a guitar solo, but it has some kind of semiotic weight to it,’” Lavers explains. “I had this idea a long time ago that’s like instead of a melody or counter melody … what if it’s just sound? ... It feels like I would cry right here, let me get a sound of crying.”
Throughout our conversation Lavers pauses to consider his choice of words. He has an elliptical, open-ended thoughtfulness to the way he expresses himself that is as generous to his listeners as it is slightly maddening for a journalist. He isn’t evasive or even fussy. He’s a dude – and a very plainspoken one at that. But he’s also someone clearly attuned to the full weight of his words and how his certainties as an artists are heightened by the shadow of doubt. In other respects he’s something of a black box, both to himself and to others. He doesn’t easily ascribe causes to his feelings or share biographical detail that is too personal. Lavers’ ability to decenter himself is all the more remarkable given how beautifully he can capture fraught emotions in the round.
The closest he comes to a deep personal disclosure on the record is the absolutely gutting Tyler Richard. The song, which bears the first and middle name of the artist’s late brother, who died suddenly at 19 years old from accidental carbon monoxide poisoning, is about meeting a deceased loved one in his dreams. But their nightly presence isn’t reassuring, it’s agonizing. As Lavers wrestles with the limits of his grief, the song’s ever spiraling synth progression gets subsumed by samples of blood-curdling screams. It’s unclear whether he’s barreled through or retreated from the music’s roiling, white-hot emotion, but the song dramatizes how resolute one has to be – as both a person and an artist – to face down what pains you most.
The ambiguity in Chanel Beads isn’t always so laden with doom; living in suspense also means living in hope. The record’s other great jaw-dropper is Silver Cup, the sole track to feature McGrory in lead vocals. Her lyrics are incredibly moving and recast ambiguity as a headlong romantic thrill. “There is a language to your soul / I give it all I know it’s hard to believe it,” she sings over bright guitars, like the reassuring angel on his heavy shoulder.
“Maya and I got our spiritual and psychic armor built and strong,” Lavers says, “and I think the best part of our collaboration and relationship is just being able to … help me repair and fortify that psychic armor, and vice versa.” On a record that deals with deepest doubt, the certainty Chanel Beads’ members find in each other is all the more reason to believe in them.
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Your Day Will Come is out now via Jagjaguwar
