Chanel Beads and The Art of Not Knowing

Chanel Beads isn’t trying to explain themselves. If anything, frontman Shane Lavers is suspicious of definitive answers altogether.

“I used to think that thoughts or opinions I have were these eternal ways of looking at things, and now I’m very aware that they’re temporary. One day I might feel like I wrote the best song ever, and the next I’ll feel like I can’t write a song again.”

I meet Lavers and Maya McGrory, two thirds of the Brooklyn-based experimental electronic project, in Williamsburg on a balmy early summer evening. It’s the closing stretch to a long day of pre-album release press for Lavers. The sundappled Hudson glitters behind us as we find a shady picnic table underneath Domino Park’s towering turquoise gantry cranes. After a day of promotion, I ask him how he feels just a week out from album release day. “It feels well?” he searches for the right word for it. “I just forget sometimes because we were just coming back from Australia,” he says.

There’s a beat after he speaks, like he’s still catching up to the fact that the week even happened.

Since releasing their breakout 2024 debut, Chanel Beads has quietly become one of indie music’s most talked-about new acts, earning early co-signs from artists like Billie Eilish and Rosalía while building a devoted following around its hazy blend of experimental electronics, dream-pop, and fractured songwriting. The project, composed of Lavers, Maya McGrory, and violinist Zachary Paul, originated as Lavers’ solo recording project before gradually expanding into a collaborative unit.

Now gearing up for the release of their second album, Your Day Will Come, a follow-up to the success of their 2024 debut album — interestingly, one of the very same title — they’ve just wrapped an extensive stretch on the road, including touring with Lorde on her Ultrasound Tour and testing new material in front of live audiences. After a year trekking from the US to Europe and New Zealand, they seem to still be settling back into New York life as album release week finally arrives.

“I’ve been sharing this music with so many friends for so long that to me it feels like it’s already out,” he says. “I feel proud and I feel like it does everything I wanted it to do on this record.”

What that “everything” is, he doesn’t fully articulate — or perhaps chooses not to. Instead, he gestures toward something more abstract: a record shaped less by answers than by a sustained feeling of anticipation without resolution. The title itself, he explains, emerged from that same tension.

“A lot of people told us it'd be hard to market, that people would just be confused,” Lavers admits the repeated title began almost as a dare. “It was a bad idea, which made me want to do it more.” What started as a joke eventually became something more meaningful: The first Your Day Will Come, he explains, carried the ambiguity of a promise, while the second interrogates it. “The first one is like someone telling you that and you don't know if it's good or bad. The second one is like, do you believe them that it is coming?”

"The record is stitched together from 14 tracks with abstract titles like “JBL Speaker In The Fireplace” and “The Coward Forgets His Nightmare,” a naming convention that has become quintessential to the Chanel Beads world. At one point, I blank on the title of the song I liked the most, quickly searching my notes to find it. Lavers laughs when I admit it. “It’s hard for us to remember them,” says Lavers. “Title always comes last. Every single time…which makes it hard to keep things organized.”

I eventually find the track in my notes: Outside Your Life. Its lyrics — “Thought that you went insane / Better off you went away” — with sounds of weeping and warped electronics peppered throughout hint at grief, memory, and abandonment. Lavers’ songwriting often returns to themes of absence; the musician lost his brother to carbon monoxide poisoning in 2010. Across the record, moments of unease surface repeatedly, though Lavers is notably reticent to discuss personal meaning. “[Fans] ask what something is about, and once you tell them, they can set it down and never think about it again,” says Lavers.

The album’s cover — which Lavers is quick to correct is a “grotesque,” not a gargoyle, because it lacks a water spout — is one of the easiest ways to tell the two records apart. The tiny stone figure was discovered at a Connecticut flea market and later photographed hanging on the band's apartment wall before being cropped into the looming creature it appears to be. In conversation, though, the distinctions become less rigid. “We have ways of talking about [the albums] and we’ll let other people have their ways of talking.”

And their own ways of evolving, too. From recording to release, Chanel Beads remains detached from trends and expectations. When asked how they balance instinct against external pressure, both are quick to shut the premise down entirely.

“It’s not really about appeasing anyone,” McGrory says. “That just taints the whole process. If you attach yourself too much to what [fans] want, it’s a lose-lose because you’re never going to be able to be new and please them.”