Chanel Beads compel you to notice something new about something ordinary—to catch the lunar glow of a gas station bleeding into the night sky and detect its strange, alien message. Grasping for these moments of suspension that hover at the edge of meaning, the music transforms the detritus of the everyday into traces of epiphany.
Your Day Will Come is Chanel Beads’ debut album, coming on the heels of a few singles and EPs that generated a minor buzz in their hometown of New York. Chanel Beads have been building a mystique around their gentle sincerity, understated songwriting, and intimate live performances. Their first full-length elaborates on this “less-is-more” and “small-is-big” mentality through its 12-bit tonality and self-consciously unpolished aesthetic. Songs meander and end abruptly, denying conventional chorus structures, resounding proudly through kitschy software instruments, over-processed effects, and underproduced mixes. More ambitious than a GarageBand demo but far from studio quality, the record’s undercooked style aligns it with the amateur songwriting and DIY recording techniques of the bedroom pop genre.
Chanel Beads issued Your Day Will Come‘s first single, “Police Scanner”, in November 2023, which set the tone for the upcoming full-length. The song opens with a simple three-chord progression over a plangent drone of strings. Accompanied by hesitant guitar trills, songwriter Shane Lavers sings, “You owe it to yourself / Gotta believe in something else.” The track communicates a search for faith, a desire to believe that has yet to find its object. This uncertainty permeates the genre stylings: neither lo-fi nor hi-fi, neither pop nor rock, but “self-aware”, according to Lavers’ lyrics. It understands its crisis of faith as equally a crisis of genre. The snare’s cavernous dullness, resonating as if recorded in a cardboard cathedral, counts down to the rapture—or, in Lavers’ words, “Something strange, yeah, something new.”
The fifth track, “Unifying Thought”, is breezier than its predecessors, carried by a lively drum pattern that moves with the loose swing of an Unknown Mortal Orchestra line. Atonal guitar strums create a timid counterpoint, with the drums hesitating as if unsure of their place. It builds to a crescendo, with Lavers’ intensified vocals taking an inventory of life’s misfortunes: “Man up on the cross / Writeup from your boss.” Yet, he shifts abruptly to optimism: “Focus on the love in your heart / Had a unifying thought, but I missed it.” Despite its guilelessness, the song’s forced positivity is held like a torch against the darkness of nihilism.
Your Day Will Come is a testament to the growing significance of bedroom pop, complete with the unique strain of hipster spirituality frequently in tow—but it owes a substantial debt to the genre’s forerunners. Alex G‘s recent album God Save the Animals is a template for the genre’s deadpan flirtations with the divine. Many of the MIDI instruments and samples that define Chanel Beads’ sound can also be found in Alex G’s back catalog (see, for example, his song “Promise”).
However, Chanel Beads’ curation and blending of elements in Your Day Will Come creates a dynamism entirely its own. The LP embraces its imperfections, creating an introspective listening experience perfectly suited to solitary moments of minor epiphany that inspired it. Amid stretches of boredom and alienation, it uncovers flashes of revelation—insights that carry the bedroom pop genre to a new level of ambitiousness while staying faithful to its homemade appeal. From this space between boredom and revelation, thrall and ambition, ambivalence and transcendence, Your Day Will Come extends a unifying thought—even if our worst fears are true and we’ve already missed it.