Always in good company, American Shane Lavers continues to astonish with his mystical pop.
Déjà vu ? Before even diving into Chanel Beads’s new album, we circle back twice to his title: Your Day Will Come (“ton/votre jour viendra”), the same title as his predecessor released in 2024. Not a reissue, nor a covers record, not even really a spiritual sequel, this reuse merely underlines the force of that maxim for the New Yorker Shane Lavers.
Behind the esotericism of this haunted motto that seems to obsess the American artist (an insurrection?, a metamorphosis?, a threat?), lies the perfect demonstration of spectral music, always elusive yet never a drag, from Chanel Beads. A form of pop with mystical impermanence, floating, fluid, always to come.
A Song Inherited from Midwest Emo
This sense of strangeness, as unreal as it is powerfully moving, is everywhere on Your Day Will Come, the second of that name—and it keeps taking detours before it surfaces. In Shane Lavers, the rejection of a strict hierarchy of sounds and the temptation to sterilize them yields a variety of striking and intoxicating aesthetic reversals.
In this pagan cathedral, a rudimentary harpsichord take answers to a vocal note drawn from his iPhone; the overflowing emotion of his Midwest Emo–inherited singing pierces the veil of these ghostly recordings. Fond of guerrilla-style recording methods, Shane Lavers stages his chamber rock as a series of pastoral computer compositions: a Luncheon on the Grass on the Windows 98 hillside.
With distant tambourines captured from afar, compositions that recall The Cure at the dawn of computer music and Auto-Tune or tearful Primal Scream, and chorales compressed to collapse, Chanel Beads’s music seems as much to come from Star Trek as from the Middle Ages.
A kind of counterpart to Oklou’s Choke Enough (2025) guitars (well supported by her collaborators Colle and Anastasia Coope), obsessed and tirelessly worked on the idea of sublimating these sonic vestiges into a post-apocalyptic world. A cry in the night, torn and liberating, before the dawn of a new day.
Your Day Will Come (Jagjaguwar/Modulor). Out on June 26.
