The Real-Life Wardrobe of Chanel Beads’s Shane Lavers, Whose Everyday Pants Are Vintage G-Star Raw Jeans

Shane Lavers, known by his stage name Chanel Beads, is a week away from releasing the follow-up to his 2024 debut album, Your Day Will Come. In a bizarre and poignant move, he chose to name it the same thing. Fittingly, over the course of my afternoon in Williamsburg, Brooklyn with Lavers, 32, I’ll come to find he loves contradictions and the space in between things. “I had a meandering path,” he says of his upbringing. “I didn’t really have strong ambition or direction. Just this ambient frustration and inability to do anything.”

The musician grew up in Minnesota, leaving when he turned 18 in an effort to figure out what he wanted to do with his life and where he wanted to be—to “just take stuff in,” he says. He moved to Montana and then Seattle, where he contemplated moving to LA but ultimately stayed for love. He spent time playing house shows on weekends, experimenting with the boundaries of performance. But when his girlfriend felt moved to move to New York, Lavers decided to follow her east. “That’s around the time that I actually had a point of view and felt a little bit more realized as a person.”

Back when he was playing those house shows, he performed both as a band and solo. “Chanel Beads has always been amorphous,” he says. “It is a band, and it isn’t a band. It’s a solo thing, but it’s not a solo thing. It’s more of a conversation that I’m having with myself and with people.”

On both his debut and its upcoming follow-up (due out June 26), his music is atmospheric and abstract, melodic and hazy. His vocals are androgynous. Sometimes, Chanel Beads sounds like both a dream and a nightmare.

When we meet up at his record label’s office, Lavers and I spend a chunk of a hot summer afternoon discussing the origins of Chanel Beads, why he decided to run back his album name, how he learned to be less precious about his favorite vintage sweatshirt, and Werner Herzog.

Sweatshirt by No Maintenance. Vintage tee. Vintage loafers. Vintage jeans by G-Star Raw.

GQ: Do you have a first musical memory?

Shane Lavers: Growing up, my mom was obsessed with Karen Carpenter and would play her a lot and sing along with her in the car. I remember “Rainy Days and Mondays,” especially, was a song where [I experienced] melancholy. That’s still pretty imprinted on my brain, that kind of arrangement and lack of pretension. Carpenters were huge for me as a child. When I was pretty young, I saw a CD of Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols—I thought that was the coolest album cover. The words “Sex Pistols” were so captivating to me. That sparked, “Okay, I’m going to discover stuff on my own.” [So did] burning mixed CDs. My older brother had really eclectic taste, and so I would listen to what he did. It was fun to form an opinion on something that’s curated by someone else.