Tipped by Lorde and Billie Eilish, the New York musician twists sublime folk and chaotic synths into bewitching new shapes
At first Shane Lavers can’t get through. Then he’s on video call but I cannot speak. When we finally make a clear connection over the phone, I can hear that he’s surrounded by nature, with faint snatches of birdsong at the edge of his measured, slightly gravelly speech. The musician who performs both in and as Chanel Beads (it remains unclear even to its core members whether they’re a band or a solo project) is on location shooting a music video somewhere on the coast of North Carolina. Encountering him as a disembodied voice, never mind one competing with worldly twittering and chirping, somehow feels more fitting than it would for most other musicians.
For years, Lavers has homed in on a cryptic, panoramic sound that ricochets from catchy, shout-along rock music to flare-ups of dissonant experimental noise. If the typical payoff of a pop song is to encapsulate a clear emotional arc in three-minute, verse-chorus structures, the appeal of a Chanel Beads track is much more unwieldy. Earlier singles such as Ef, Police Scanner and Male Friendship flicker in and out of focus, establishing a ground-floor of groove, only for Lavers and his bandmates to upend it with swelling strings, chiming guitar and ear-splitting samples. Lyrically, his songwriting gathers around an unstable emotional core that is so dense in its unspoken feeling that it manages to achieve an aching kind of orbit. It’s Lavers’s great talent to handle all of that swirling intensity while keeping everything suspended in the air.
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