“I feel like we’re just an internet band,” Shane Lavers, the mind behind Chanel Beads, says in the months since releasing this year’s Your Day Will Come.
It’s an apt description for a group whose 2024 debut album, also titled Your Day Will Come, introduced a liminal, zonked-out sound that resembled the woozier parts of SoundCloud rap or Cocteau Twins playing from a busted iPhone. Littered with drone, field recordings, and chopped-up sections, a Chanel Beads song could only be captured on a laptop: less layered than labored over.
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“We hold multitudes of where we’re from and also the different places we lived,” vocalist/guitarist Maya McGrory adds, who doubles as Lavers’ partner. For a while, that was Seattle, where they were neighbors and lived in houses that threw shows. Before then, it was the suburbs of Minnesota, where Lavers would rent Replacements CDs from the library and torrent MP3s off LimeWire, sometimes ending up with the wrong version (“It’d be the music video audio where there’s dialogue [or] ripped from a skate video or something… That’s inspirational, in a weird way, to our music,” he says). Right now, it’s Brooklyn, where they moved four years after meeting and, along with violinist Zachary Paul, have since become an important part of the city’s indie scene through transfixing live shows.
Moni Haworth
Both times I’ve seen Chanel Beads, the room was tight and abnormally dark. The first, at Big Ears in 2025, presented a hallucinatory, fragmented collage that mirrored a day drifting in and out of sets disparate in genre. When I caught them at Mahall’s in Cleveland six months later, the setup was just as bare and moody. Lavers said little to the crowd so a deeper trance could take hold, immersing us in a sound that twisted into new shapes, song by song. By the time they got to “Urn,” a dizzy vignette about carrying grief, the set reached its peak, revealing a band that liked extremes. Against a stage brightened only by a spotlight tilted at the wall, Lavers ripped into a shriek and began play-fighting with Paul, as if hit with a surge of adrenaline. The next minute, he picked up an electric flute and slipped into a meditative, otherworldly solo.
“If we talk about early days till now, it’s definitely been me and Shane carrying that balance of something antagonistic and then something raw and sweet,” McGrory says, reflecting on the energy that sustains their performances.
Sitting next to each other, Lavers boils it down further. “A lot of it’s just trying to ride that feeling you had one night 12 months ago, but also letting the words and the feeling and the meaning find whatever it means that night again,” he says, taking considered pauses. “And especially, too, for me, if I’m singing these words and I’m making eye contact with someone in the show, it’s going to feel so different right then and there. Because I’m either looking at someone who’s completely indifferent or looking at someone who’s feeling something, too.”
Three weeks after that Mahall’s show, Chanel Beads opened for Lorde at Madison Square Garden, playing on a dimly lit stage to a sold-out room just hours after releasing “The Coward Forgets His Nightmare.” The performance required them to don their “spiritual armor,” Lavers describes: putting their heads down, accepting their reality, and mostly playing to each other, rather than interacting with the crowd. “We brought those lights for the Lorde show because there would be no lights if we didn’t bring them,” Lavers says. “We would have to pay someone at the venue more money than we’re getting paid to run lights… Almost everything we do is because there’s a material, utilitarian reason.”
None of this is shocking to those who’ve been onto Chanel Beads the past few years, seeing them play in an abandoned train tunnel with their friends in YHWH Nailgun or in the aisle of a drugstore. But it hasn’t stopped the details of their band from getting slippery. For a while, people thought they were Swedish, akin to Drain Gang or Yung Lean. There are the faulty Dimes Square attributions and the misunderstood credits (“It’s kind of funny. There’s so much sound that [Zach’s] doing, and then they’ll point to the one thing he’s not doing,” Lavers says). At the same time, they keep the meaning inside the band and give no easy answers. “I’d rather just set it straight in person,” McGrory says. “Anybody can come up and ask me, but I’m not gonna correct anything that’s published. I think it’s fun.”
In a similar vein, the members of Chanel Beads don’t explain what the lyrics mean. Likewise, the sounds get hard to describe. I’m thinking of “Outside Your Life,” a quietly devastating song from their latest, where a wobbly beat dissolves into a sort of mutated, jinxed drone midway through. It’s unclear if it’s a vocal, a sample, or an instrument being warped in Pro Tools. This is by design: You are required to accept that reverse-engineering a Chanel Beads song is futile, though, for me, the blurriness produces wonder, not frustration. There’s beauty in not knowing and never knowing.
“It’s funny because there’s a lot less samples than people think,” Lavers says. “It’s just that the samples are loud and declare themselves. But a lot of the drumming is recorded by us. It’s just messed with. I always think that I’m being very revealing with my lyrics, but… Well, there’s a lot of intentionally removing context between lines and stuff, so things jump around. But I like that everyone has their own reaction to things.”
Moni Haworth
Raw and poetic, the songwriting is distinct, circling around love, memory, and superstition, though split from its subject. This is a preference Lavers had from the start — stripping away the framework so the listener doesn’t know who the “you,” the “me,” and the “they” are. It’s threaded through a spare yet lyrical style that works in tandem with the sound: moments where mundanity hits like an epiphany or gritty realities turn mosaic. By the end of “The Coward Forgets His Nightmare,” Lavers’ cries run against a radiance that’s bloomed from all sides — having achieved some catharsis without necessarily getting closure. “I thought I saw you smiling in all my memories,” he sings.
Remembrance, and the ways it’s eternally shifting, stays at their core, holding space for what an interaction (or, in the case of “Tyler Richard,” a dream) felt like over what happened. “Really something that we’ve used from the beginning is that you can recontextualize stuff as life goes on,” Lavers says. “So there’s a lot of intentionally revisiting words and changing the meaning of them. I mean, the whole thesis of the album titles is that when you revisit something, it changes.
“I think we have this idea that there’s a filing cabinet in our brain, and we just pull up the file, but how memory works is that you reconstruct the thing every time you remember it,” he continues. “And so by reconstructing it, it morphs and changes because it’s not actually a perfect record of something — it’s a resketching of it.”
