Chanel Beads

A library for the blind, then a basement

Shane Lavers grew up in the suburbs of Minnesota, taking in his parents' country-pop and Karen Carpenter alongside an older brother's Southern rap and Slipknot, and filling the gaps with files pulled off torrent sites — ambient records at one end, the Beach Boys at the other. After college he moved to Seattle in 2016 and took a job at a library for the blind. By around 2017 he was playing the city's DIY circuit: basements, warehouses, at one point an abandoned train tunnel. It was there he met Maya McGrory, who records under her own name as Colle. The two later relocated to New York together.

The Chanel Beads name first appeared on an EP, Zut Alors, in 2018, followed by singles that arrived at an unhurried pace — "Strobe Light Two / Layup" in 2020, then "Ef" and "True Altruism" in 2022. Those last two did the work of a calling card. The method was already recognisable: real instruments, synthetic ones and heavily manipulated ones layered together, degraded audio clips and found sound sitting underneath pop melodies, and song structures that refuse to resolve where a listener expects them to. The touchstones Lavers cites are eighties records made by people obsessed with studio texture — the Blue Nile, Prefab Sprout, David Sylvian — rather than anything guitar-led.

Your Day Will Come, first version

Jagjaguwar signed the project, and on 8 November 2023 the single "Police Scanner" announced a debut album. "Idea June" and "Embarrassed Dog" followed, and Your Day Will Come arrived on 19 April 2024. It scored 78 on Metacritic; Pitchfork gave it 7.6, crediting it with an unusual beauty built from oblique melodies and deliberately unstable production. Paste, The Line of Best Fit and Flood ran positive reviews.

What followed was a long touring year that widened the audience considerably. Chanel Beads played South by Southwest and Pitchfork Music Festival, ran headline dates through the UK and North America, and took support slots with Lorde and Mount Kimbie — an unusually broad spread for a project whose recorded output was still mostly singles. In April 2025 came a rework of Leya's "Corners", and in November 2025 a festival appearance at Corona Capital in Mexico City. The first new song of the second album cycle, "The Coward Forgets His Nightmare", appeared on 1 October 2025.

Your Day Will Come, second version

On 29 April 2026 Lavers announced a second album carrying exactly the same title as the first, released alongside the single "Song for the Messenger". He has been candid that the repetition began as something closer to a provocation than a concept — a friend told him it would be difficult to market and confusing for anyone who had already seen the project tour under that banner, which is roughly when he decided to do it. Speaking to The Line of Best Fit, he framed the difference between the two records as a shift in the grammar of the phrase: the first carried the ambiguity of a promise, the second interrogates whether the promise was ever worth anything.

A third single, "Dust in the Wind", co-written with Isaac Eiger of Strange Ranger, came on 28 May 2026 with the announcement of a North American tour starting in September. The album itself was released by Jagjaguwar on 26 June 2026, its sleeve a photograph of a stone grotesque.

Much of it was composed on foot, Lavers walking Brooklyn at night and looping fragments until the sequencing became obvious. He recorded sub-bass on his desk to capture the physical vibration rather than the tone. The guest list is drawn from the same downtown experimental circle the project came up in: More Eaze, Anastasia Coope, Tchad Cousins, Bella Litsa and Eiger. McGrory, a collaborator of nearly eight years by this point, wrote "Silver Cup" on her own. The track "Tyler Richard" refers to Lavers' older brother, who died in 2010 of accidental carbon monoxide poisoning; the record circles dreams in which the dead are still alive. The organising question Lavers has repeated in interviews is blunt enough — whether this is hell, or whether love is sufficient.

How it landed

The reviews have been strong and broadly agree on what changed. NME read the record as refinement rather than repetition, describing a move towards song-shaped writing without losing the screamed passages and abrasive samples, and hearing Alex G's mix of aloof tunefulness and lo-fi grandeur in the guitar parts. The Line of Best Fit gave it 8/10 and argued the record's real achievement is temporal: where a generation of artists have mined eighties cultural memory as homage, this one sits in a perpetual present, its androgynous, processed vocals reading as MIDI made human. Paste awarded a B+ and described the effect as a lucid dream — everything knowable, everything liable to turn to dust. The aggregate critic score settled at 78.

The general critical position, then, is that Chanel Beads has become a pop act without becoming a conventional one, and that the doubled title is less a gimmick than a working argument about whether an artist can ever make a clean break from what people already expect.

The trio on stage

Live, the project is a three-piece: Lavers at the front handling vocals and electronics, McGrory on vocals and guitar, and Zachary Paul on violin, whose sustained lines do much of the work that reverb and tape damage do on the records. The staging is deliberately minimal — smoke and hard white light that reduces the three of them to silhouettes, matching the grainy, shadow-washed imagery the project uses everywhere else.

June 2026 brought the first Australian and New Zealand dates: Fremantle on 3 June, Oxford Arts Factory in Sydney as part of Vivid, Melbourne Town Hall on 6 June for RISING's Day Tripper programme, a Brisbane headline show on 7 June and Meow in Wellington on 9 June. Reviewing the Sydney date for RUSSH, Magdalene Shapter found a sold-out room packed wall to wall, the queue outside cut off by security at capacity, and a crowd dressed in the same hoodies and baggy jeans as the frontman — "more of a communion than a concert", with the audience chanting along, arms flailing.

The North American run began in September, with Mechatok and Ivy Knight opening. Sets have been running twelve to thirteen songs. Brisbane on 7 June opened with "Unifying Thought" into "Embarrassed Dog" and "Spirit Showing", worked through "Song for the Messenger", "Idea June", "Profane Break", "The Coward Forgets His Nightmare" and "Police Scanner", and closed on "Dust in the Wind", "Silver Cup" and "Ef". The Sinclair in Cambridge on 13 September took a similar shape across thirteen songs, again opening with "Unifying Thought" and adding "I Think I Saw" and "Opening in the Gate". "Police Scanner", "Ef" and "Embarrassed Dog" remain the most frequently played songs in the project's documented history, so the 2024 material has not been pushed aside to make room.