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t’s hard not to fall under the spell of . Their dreamlike sound is an amalgam of melancholic new age, ’80s new wave, hypnagogic psychedelia, nursery-rhyme sweetness and ‘found sounds’. It’s a sonic hybrid that feels wholly otherworldly, located in a liminal zone beyond space and time. There’s a surreal cinematic quality to it, echoing the meta-filmscape of .
Like their excellent, enigmatic second album ‘Your Day Will Come’, Shane Lavers, the man behind Chanel Beads, is a bit of a mystery. Like a butterfly in flight, it’s hard to catch his essence. He keeps his camera off during our hour-long chat, wriggling away from definitive statements, staying guarded.
Chanel Beads on The Cover of NME. Credit: Eve Alpert for NME
Lavers’ commitment to letting the music do the talking is admirable. Over two albums, both called ‘Your Day Will Come’, Chanel Beads have, sonically at least, created a universe of chill-waved ghost pop. They may have antecedents in the likes of Broken Social Scene, Ariel Pink and Alex G, but what they’ve made is uniquely theirs.
That individual streak has been present since they released their first EP, ‘Zut Alors’, in 2018, and coursed through 2022 breakout single ‘Ef’. It’s also what’s attracted a swell of fans, including fellow musicians Billie Eilish, Lorde and Frank Ocean. The latter shared 2023 track ‘Police Scanner’ to his Instagram story, but Lavers remains unfazed by the attention: “I’m not really interested in curation as a form of expression. If some famous person likes the music, it’s like, well, we are all listening to the same stuff. We all have access to the same stuff.”
Although he remains fairly stoic during our time together and even calls himself “intentionally unsentimental”, he brightens up when conversation turns to another of those three celeb admirers. Last year, Lorde invited Chanel Beads to open for her on some dates of her Ultrasound world tour. A veteran of DIY shows, he describes playing arenas as “a really wild experience. It feels like you’re playing a spaceship”. Still, despite the size, he was able to tap into a personal connection with the audience. “Regardless of the venue size, when you’re on stage playing, there’s a sense that in every room you can still make eye contact with one person when you’re on stage,” he explains.
Credit: Eve Alpert for NME
The tour had a profound effect on the group, which, along with Lavers, then featured Maya McGrory on vocals, Zachary Paul on violin and keyboards, and Tchad Cousins on drums (the new album features Mari Rubio on pedal steel and guitar, as well as vocalists Anastasia Coope and Bella Lista). “It kind of really changed our group dynamic. It was like ‘Damn guys, I didn’t think we could [play stages that size]!’ It brought us closer together.”
‘Your Day Will Come’ is a record that sounds more like a self-contained album than its predecessor. “It almost feels like this is the first record I put out, in a weird way,” Lavers says. “It’s the first one where it’s like there were people waiting for it.” Did he feel any pressure after the critical success of their 2024 debut? “I feel a lot of internal pressure,” he replies. “If you have something to say, there’s a feeling that you want to get it out before it changes.” He’s not bothered about what people have to say about his work online. “It’s easy to think that all of that stuff [online] just exists on my phone. I can just put my phone down and go for a walk.” He’s not worried that if he absorbs any discourse it will stifle his creativity – more that, if he does, “it will just make me go crazy”.
“I love that dream logic kind of has a feeling of cause and effect but also not”
The seeds of Chanel Beads were planted in Lavers’ childhood. Foreshadowing the band’s androgynous “voice” (the duet-singing between himself and McGrory), the first song he remembers stopping him in his tracks as a kid is ‘Fast Car’ by Tracy Chapman. “I was obsessed. Part of it was ‘is it a man or a woman?’” Despite briefly taking piano lessons as a child growing up in suburban Minnesota, he’s self-taught. “My piano teacher dropped me because I refused to practice, but she taught me how to improvise,” he says. “She said: ‘You play these notes with your right hand that’s all in the same key.’ And I would do that incessantly for hours on end. I thought I was making some sort of epic one-hour track. It was really just the notes C and F for hours.”
For the first 10 to 15 years that Lavers spent creating music, he was exploring sounds, experimenting on his computer and home keyboard. It wasn’t until he got a job working in a library that the needle moved. “I could just have headphones in for eight hours a day,” he says. “It meant that after a while of working 9 to 5 and listening to music the whole time, you get bored of the music, so it made me a bit more adventurous. So I would record these really long improvisations. I would have something exciting to listen to. It got me experimenting with form.”
Credit: Eve Alpert for NME
Going public as a musician took a bit longer: his first shows came soon after his 2016 move to Seattle, where he played at the Space Bar. “I was a late bloomer in terms of playing shows and connecting with real people, instead of smoking weed in the suburbs and not sharing music and not playing shows.”
A eureka moment of connection came when he met collaborator McGrory through the DIY scene in Seattle, where he moved in 2016. “It was almost eight years ago, and we just talked about music all day, every day,” he says. “We started making music together, which was rare to me.” Their harmony vocals, which are the heart and soul of Chanel Beads, sound like a zombie children’s choir, filled with awe, naivety and a layer of otherworldliness. “The first time we recorded our voices together we’d never heard something like that before. Like we were tapping into a mystery with a capital ‘M’, like nuclear fission or something. [Maya is] the first audience for anything I make.”
Credit: Eve Alpert for NME
If you pivot away from the sepia-tinged synths, insect-like guitars and androgynous vocals of ‘Your Day Will Come’ and home in on the lyrics, there is a darkness around the sonic rainbow. Songs like ‘The Coward Forgets His Nightmares’ (“Did you think that the music could’ve saved your soul?…I thought the music would save you/I wish it saved me”) and ‘Song For The Messenger’ (“I always thought I would kill myself…lead me to the water/Save me from the slaughter”) crackle with desperation. Lavers is reluctant to ascribe specific meaning or autobiographical significance to the tracks. “I’m a little allergic to being like ‘This song is about this, this song’s about that,’” he says. “I think it carries more power when it’s about what you think the song is about.”
Does Lavers get inspiration from dreams? “Yeah, absolutely,” he says, “especially dream logic. I love that dream logic kind of has a feeling of cause and effect but also not; it’s seemingly random. There’s a song on the record that’s about a dream.”
“Most Chanel Beads songs are about the desire to resolve a contradiction that feels unresolvable”
That seems to be the track ‘Tyler Richards’. Named after the brother he lost to accidental carbon monoxide poisoning aged 19, and featuring a keyboard line that recalls the theme to Twin Peaks, its lyrics are heartbreakingly vulnerable: speaking to grief that grips you in the middle of the night (“Night bends different when I’m near you/Got this life in my fingers – can I give you?/ I wrote a song for you…/I see your face in a dream”).
Deflecting personal questions, Lavers reveals that sometimes even he can’t get to the true meaning of a song. “It’s not like I’m trying to be confusing. I just think that sometimes it eludes you,” he says. “There’s a saying about creativity that is something like ‘If I could have told you this story without showing you, then I wouldn’t have made the film.’” He pulls back the curtain the tiniest bit when he adds: “I will say that most Chanel Beads songs are about the desire to resolve a contradiction that feels unresolvable.”
The cover of the new album leans into this theme, featuring an intense close-up of a stone-like carving of a goblin with an indecipherable look on its face. “I just love freaky little guys,” says Lavers brightly. “They’re always my favourite character in movies. It reflects a bit of the attitude of being playfully mischievous.”
Lavers could well be describing himself and his gentle subversion of expectations. There’s no sense that he’s “playing the game” – or at least, if he is, we’ve not worked out which one yet. That spirit will no doubt charge whatever Chanel Beads do next – and he’s already hard at work on that puzzle. “I’ve got a lot of music, and I’m excited,” he says. “I’m trying to work quick, but I don’t know how much I want to put out into the world yet.” As ever, Lavers remains an enigma.
Chanel Beads’ ‘Your Day Will Come’ is out now via Jagjaguwar.
Listen to Chanel Beads’ exclusive playlist to accompany The Cover below on Spotify or on Apple Music here.
Words: Priya Elan
Photography: Eve Alpert
Label: Jagjaguwar, Secretly
