The title of Chanel Beads’ second record, Your Day Will Come, which is also the namesake of their debut, doesn’t quite announce itself. The phrase stands there, lingers, grinning, like it knows something you won’t say. But the longer its foreboding undertone goes unresolved, the less it feels like some cosmic joke mocking you. It’s sort of a realization. The phrase isn’t a kept promise; it’s a promise in waiting with an echo that hurts more each time it’s repeated: “Your day will come.” The title processes what may never arrive—love, relief, a better self—and the album sits with that ache, the pain of wanting, an arrival that never comes.
That gnawing, jaw-clenched yearning for something more is the marrow of this album. But Shane Lavers, the mastermind behind Chanel Beads, isn’t interested in spelling out what that is or what’s missing, and he sure as hell wasn’t going to arrange these songs into an offering that is clear and tidy. Instead, Your Day Will Come is presented as a series of opaque emotional aftershocks: self-loathing, heartbreak, the wish to disappear, and the strange, opposite urge to keep dragging yourself forward anyway. These feelings don’t politely keep their distance from one another either; they tangle and bleed together until listeners are left dragging around a knotted ball of everything, all at once.
Your Day Will Come drifts indefinitely, and it’s because it draws from a murky musical well that blends dream pop, post-punk ambiance, and the spectral minimalism of hynogogia; the album’s sound is colored by glimmering synths, metallic percussion, and guitars that shimmer and tumble in on themselves endlessly.
Nowhere is this more evident than on “Profane Break”, where glittering coils of guitar lapse into dense synth washes and percussion that flickers at the edge of collapse, causing the whole track to feel suspended in a blurring repetition and decay. And this is a formula the entire record follows. Songs spiral, stumble, and never resolve their own haunting beauty. Melodies scratch and repeat, phrases confuse, messages lost in the noise. Each track holds a broken piece of the next. This unfinished, imprecise sensation creates the album’s tension — a tension that sees Lavers keep circling the same unreachable place, so much so that it feels obsessive, even painfully so.
That pain shows up most clearly—if ‘clear’ could even apply to this record—on “Song for the Messenger”, a track that could be considered synth-pop if it weren’t so full of dread. At first, it sounds sweet, but that quickly gives way to a heavy, depressive undertone, with its catchiness making surrendering or “giving up” feel like it’s supposed to be easy: “Jumping out of buildings / and the earth looks like a mirror…But the screams roll on when you thought you hit the water…To the water lead me to the slaughter,” Lavers sings in an almost jaunty cadence. Yeah, pretty bleak, right? Still, the song is irresistible.
The tracks that follow make that bleakness stronger. “The Coward Forgets His Nightmare” echoes the former’s mood and melody, staying close enough to feel bound by the same anxious energy. On the other end of the spectrum, “Silver Cups” comes across like a mysterious light emanating from the tracks that come prior, like a pop song you remember wrong or too late with its looping guitar and an uneasily lighter vocal from Maya Collette. Chanel Beads really has a knack for making music as if it’s already blurred by memory.
This album is entrenched in this timeless haze, but every so often the present barges in through the fog like a fluorescent bulb flickering overhead, refusing to let you wallow or recede into the comfort of the record’s abstracted atmosphere. “JBL in the Fireplace” is one of those moments where the ugly residue of modern life—credit score anxiety, the indignity of letting some faceless algorithm decide if you’re fit to exist—comes into sharp, unflattering focus. It’s hilarious, until it isn’t. Even then, Lavers doesn’t marinate in contempt. “Fuck this world, I still have love for you,” he shouts. The need for connection claws its way through, whether it’s raw desire or something gentler, like affection. That’s why a line like “Life, I’m through it, but I still choose you” lands like a punch to the gut. The world outside is a landfill on fire, but love is a choice you make anyway, even if admitting it is like a confession you’d rather choke on. Chanel Beads make the gloom feel, if not conquerable, at least something you can dance with.
Needless to say, some of the sharpest writing on the record materializes when grief takes the wheel. “Tyler Richard”, which is about Lavers’ brother and his encounter with his spirit in a misty dream, treats mourning as a test of memory; it’s humiliating, unstable, and dotted with uncertainty. But to escape it, Lavers’ warped, androgynous screams rip through the track’s synthesized gloss, rendering the mournful thoughts into something nightmarish as it reattaches to what actually happened, thus breeding only more sorrow and doubt. This weight seeps through the whole record, frankly, and keeps the songs from floating off completely into the ethereal. They might shimmer, but they never detach from pain. Suffering just gets dressed up in a prettier room.
By the end, the title has stung a strong sting. What initially felt like a joke becomes the album’s clearest truth: some promises never die, just echo back, stranger and sadder, reminding us what has transpired and what never will. There’s no catharsis here on Your Day Will Come. The record sits with damage, allowing longing to stay, knowing that repetition is its own kind of pain. If the first album waited for arrival, this one lives in the after and still somehow, in all of its diffusiveness and imprecision, sounds beautiful.
