At once a hazy relic and a digital snapshot of the human experience, Your Day Will Come is the debut album from Chanel Beads, arriving April 19 via Jagjaguwar. The remarkable project announces the arrival of New York-based musician Shane Lavers as a new force in experimental music. After his 2022 singles “Ef” and “True Altruism” marked his breakout on corners of the internet, Your Day Will Come sees Lavers evolving his uncanny and dreamlike sound which he achieves through layering synthetic and real instruments. His songs feel like a memory in which you can’t distinguish between what actually happened or what was a false reproduction in your mind—although the burning emotion remains intact.
Your Day Will Come sees Lavers capturing the many contradictions of modern existence and the strange infiniteness of the digital world, as he searches for truth and faith amid competing realities. Though he incorporates the scrappy sonics of post-punk, the gripping sentimentality of pop tunes, and the spectral artifice of electronic music, he blurs lines through unconventional song structures that build into transcendental climaxes. As he intentionally prints his songs down to embed fried artifacts and ghostly remains, the resulting songs have a time-collapsing quality, both transitory and timeless.
Lavers first started writing Your Day Will Come during a period of reflection in November 2022. Stuck quarantining in his Brooklyn apartment, he found himself wanting to dig down into the core of who he truly was, apart from fleeting trends or rebounding cultural moments. So during that strange time between winter holidays, he started to write songs that wrestled with an early loss that had rippled throughout his life, foundational to the way he sees himself and the way he relates to others. Many of the lyrics that remained were in response to both internal and external conflicts. They were words that he had to speak aloud to uncover the reality of the situation.
Throughout, Lavers weaves in contributions from his live bandmates, singer-songwriter Maya McGrory (Colle) and experimental instrumentalist Zachary Paul, who offer their own layers of feeling that add to the huge emotionality of the album. Accustomed to performing in various bands when he lived in Seattle, Shane began to strip everything back when he started playing shows around NYC, working to locate what felt worthy for him to perform. That mindset informed the writing of the record, in which Lavers forced himself to only keep what felt the most necessary to say. “There was a filter to this record,” Lavers says. “If it didn’t move me while performing, then I couldn’t make it into a song. As much as I wanted to make something that was cool to the touch, I had to make something that made me feel something.” Now, his live shows see all three performers weaving together in absolute catharsis.
The filtering also meant that Lavers stripped his own sense of ego from Your Day Will Come, as shown through the obscured layering of his and McGrory’s vocals throughout the project. As McGrory offers a more full-bodied tone and Lavers often sings with his higher-pitched head voice, the two collaborators seem to meet in the middle—signaling intermingling of identities or a subconscious pining for androgyny. In this slippery space, different perspectives merge together, and there’s a sense of empathy and humility that arises from the blending of these voices.
This tactic is pushed further on “Idea June,” which sees McGrory taking over lead vocals to project Lavers’ lyrics. As McGrory sings, “The waves wash onto my shore,” in a voice that’s both earnest and digitally processed, it’s as though she's speaking as a separate embodiment of Lavers. In under two minutes, the track of clunky acoustic guitar and gutting strings lands somewhere between detachment and kinship. Similar to the off-kilter structure of “Police Scanner,” these songs are strangely affecting in their unfinished and liminal forms. Lavers, who is drawn to poor MP3 rips and transitional moments in DJ mixes, knows that these inexact musical artifacts evoke human imperfection.
“Idea June” is another feat of trickery from Lavers, who plays with ideas of sincerity and humor through production. To construct the moving string soundscapes on tracks like “Your Day Will Come” and “Coffee Culture,” he tinkered around with a free MIDI preset that allowed him to program recordings of the London Philharmonic Orchestra at will, making him laugh at the idea that he could compose a piece of “contemporary classical music” from just hitting “record” while in bed. Meanwhile, he purposefully processed the actual recorded violin, played by his classically trained collaborator Zachary Paul, making the instrument unrecognizable.
The idea of “fake jazz,” coined by Donald Fagen in a Steely Dan documentary, also informed Lavers’ production philosophy for Your Day Will Come. Admiring the phrase for making the distinction between a commercial, glossy version of what some would consider to be the “real” genre, he sought out to craft his own confusing distortions of his inspirations, like The Blue Nile, Prefab Sprout, and David Sylvian. “Embarrassed Dog” features the outlandish sound of ‘80s sophisti-pop bass played through MIDI, which is then doubled with a recorded bass guitar. The two basses mirror the dual nature of the dog that Lavers sings of, which also functions as a metaphor for how he viewed his younger self: an animal bound to the lives of other people, who only pretends to be tough and scary.
The title of Your Day Will Come is another double-sided trick. It could be read as a promise of the arrival of good karma, or it could be a reminder of one’s mortality, said out of spite. Yet as Lavers unpacks the haunting feelings of the past that he must release in order to move into his future, he reminds us that grief and hope might be closer than they seem to the naked eye.
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The Danish-born, London-based artist celebrates a breakthrough on her outstanding third solo album. With its unpretentious vocals, lo-fi production techniques and experimental songwriting, “Great Doubt” reminds me of Tirzah and Mica Levi’s art school pop. It’s definitely Sonne’s most personal and courageous album to date – just 27 minutes long, but with a high replay value. zensounds
supported by 9 fans who also own “Your Day Will Come”
Alvvays has always been great, but with this album they took it to the next level. Every one of these songs is lodged in my brain now, permanently (in a good way). s. moxley
A collection of improvised baritone sax and flute compositions that strike a compelling balance between softness and spontaneity. Bandcamp New & Notable Mar 10, 2024
