Chanel Beads
Your Day Will Come
JAGJAGUWAR
In 2024, when Shane Lavers released his breakthrough debut under the Chanel Beads moniker, each successive step into his monochrome world felt like an intimate, insular bedroom discussion between two opposing moral consciences. Leaning into the shoulder-angel, Lavers wrapped Your Day Will Come with soft percussion and vocal vulnerability made possible by a stripping-down of defenses. Arriving just two years later, Chanel Beads’ shadow-figure of a sophomore album shares the exact same name as it veers viciously to the side of his shoulder-devil.
Lavers’ new record is a jagged compilation featuring the dark sonic evolution his solo project has undergone since touring with Lorde and The Japanese House last fall, its corners familiarly tinged with rust, restriction, and human error. Recorded in a sparse studio space with speakers pushed up to his face, the record trades the uncanny artifice of his early tracks for a tactile, physical confrontation of what it looks like to face inner darkness. The magic of the album lies entirely in its volatility; Lavers masterfully weaponizes a philosophy of transfusion and detachment, colliding pristine, organic instrumentation with abrasive lo-fi urgency to thrust forward a messy, silver-plated daguerreotype of dramatic tonal shifts that, from a distance, refract angel silhouettes.
Early single “Song for the Messenger” combines the ethereal vocals of Maya McGrory and the sweeping, elegant violin lines of Zachary Paul with raw, red-lined production to pull the dream-pop wool over the listener’s eyes. As though each sudden structural drop mimics the feeling of losing love—or something close to it—there’s a compulsion to look this record head on, fueled by a distrust that it will turn its back on you. Lyrically and sonically, Your Day Will Come occupies a tense liminal space where the listener feels trapped between total nihilism and profound love, white-knuckling his arrangements until the friction yields transcendence.
Placebo or not, Your Day Will Come is a record built on dream logic, where casual contributions from ambient-indie heavyweights like More Eaze and Anastasia Coope are deliberately fractured and submerged into the sound. By subverting the stadium-sized pop perspectives lingering from his recent opening spot on an arena tour, Lavers has crafted something far more compelling than its predecessor: a tragic ballet informed by a beautifully unstable world bearing its violent doubt with hope for the future.
