Shane Lavers, Maya McGrory, Zachary Paul.
Photo by Lauren Davis/Edit by Rich Smith
The FADER’s longstanding GEN F series profiles the emerging artists you need to know right now.
Legend has it one of the seven entrances to Hell is located right outside L.A., hidden in the haunted woods behind NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory at Devil’s Gate Dam. The story goes that JPL founder and Aleister Crowley protége Jack Parsons engaged in sex magic rituals with future Church of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard beneath the demon-shaped rock throughout the 1930s and ’40s. They allegedly opened the portal in a tunnel next to the rock, summoned the god Pan, and began their Babalon Working project, an unsuccessful attempt to create the Antichrist that deeply concerned Crowley with its recklessness. Some say the portal was never closed, turning Devil’s Gate into a magnet for serial killers, dead bodies, and missing children; to this day, visitors have reported unsettling and inexplicable interactions. For Chanel Beads’ Shane Lavers, it took the form of a mumbling man who “came out of the darkness” during the video shoot for “Embarrassed Dog.”
To match the track’s feeling of dissociative dread, Lavers wanted to create a grainy, Blair Witch horror-inspired recording with longtime partner and live band member Maya McGrory, who appears as a threatening blur. A low-resolution spectre that haunts the video like Lavers’s echoey air of quiet resentment on the track, McGrory was in the middle of filming when the man appeared out of nowhere and began referring to her as his “bitch.” The camera, still running, captured part of the confrontation, which Lavers later shared on Instagram in a post promoting the release show for his debut LP, Your Day Will Come.
“Get out of here,” the man says, no longer mumbling. He’s the “most normal-looking guy,” as Lavers says, but there’s a menacing authority in his voice. “If that’s not my bitch, get out of here right now.”
The first time the Brooklyn-based musician tells the story, we’re sitting in L.A.’s Echo Park Lake, watching children scatter bird seed and tourists paddling around on swan boats. He talks about the frightening encounter so nonchalantly, it’s like we’re still joking about the absurdity of an $18 Erewhon smoothie. Lavers then appears to notice the look of wide-eyed horror on my face and reassures me: “It was dark, but weirdly comical.”
A week later, the story comes up again while I’m chatting with Lavers and McGrory over FaceTime. Both agree what happened was deeply unsettling, but that it was, and, still is, easier to think of it as “funny.”
“I do have a slightly cavalier attitude towards trauma,” Lavers says, mentioning our subconscious “avoidance” of revisiting specific events. Rather, he compares our psyches to a “huge soup of life,” where you’ll spend a lot of time “bumping up against these big chunks of ingredients that aren’t fully mixed in.”
“There’s always going to be a big bone,” he says, alluding to an inevitable run-in with some shameful or traumatic memory. But he agrees when I point out the bones are what define the soup’s overall flavor, no matter how hard you try to dilute its bitterness. It’ll always retain traces of that formative trauma, because that’s just “the way memory actually works.”
“You don't revisit the file cabinet. You recreate what you know. So whenever you recreate it, it's like a performance of it, and things get changed,” he explains. Similarly, Lavers used the imperfect art of mental reproduction to blur out the finer details while making Your Day Will Come, allowing the specifics to dissolve into the general sense of mourning held within the fuzz and feedback.
Made while Lavers was extremely sick with COVID-19, it’s an intuitive record about grief, loss, and the fallibility of memory in the shadow of trauma. Cobbled together from hand-clap drum loops, atmospheric MIDI presets, and staticky guitar samples, Lavers manipulated and rearranged simple riffs and chords in about a hundred different ways. Nothing is as it seems on Your Day Will Come. It’s Lavers’s take on Donald Fagen’s concept of “fake jazz,” or the distinction between commercial knock-offs of what’s considered “real genre” work.
A philosophy that gives Lavers plenty to play with in terms of aesthetics and style, it adds an uncanny edge to songs like “Dedicated to the World,” where manufactured pop arrangements are ripped apart and lose their candy-coated sheen, or “Police Scanner’s” synthetic indie folk, where live band member Zachary Paul turns an electric violin into a scraggly post-punk guitar or a country fiddle.
“A lot of the record is about examining yourself. I feel like I was really interested in saying things that felt ugly or petty to myself.”
Your Day Will Come has an ephemeral quality to it between the voice notes-like lyrics and what Lavers refers to as the memory of “a rock song, and how it sounds in your head.” The end result is a record that sounds like a blurry refraction of every single song you’ve heard in your life, accompanied by memories of some terrible hardcore show, or your dad listening to Bob Dylan, or the corny backing track for some ‘80s blockbuster. With every creative choice Lavers invokes a suspicious nostalgia that creates friction and confusion. But for a child stuck in a tidy suburb in the polite Midwest, the imperfect replication of sounds from our cultural consciousness and messing with that shared memory to the point of second-guessing ourselves felt like a way to “explore this venom that kind of felt taboo to myself.”
“A lot of the record is about examining yourself. I feel like I was really interested in saying things that felt ugly or petty to myself,” he explains of the deeply personal and private record. In a way, the record was his therapist, and he just wants his HIPAA protections.
Soft-spoken and shy by nature, Lavers is the kind of guy who groans about the fact he has to do a photoshoot for this profile (in the end, we spared him). All he wanted to do was figure out the sound of his grief, to replicate the tangle of hazy, distressing, and friction-filled emotions he’s accumulated throughout his life, so he can begin to understand.
“I want to make music that inspires a really intense emotion in myself. It can take a while to try to describe [why you wrote it],” he says. “But, at the end of the day, it’s like, ‘Why does it exist? Well, it made me feel something really strong.’”
It’s rare to see an artist smile at the idea of other people projecting onto their work, but Lavers knows his silence is something for others, who can use Your Day Will Come if they’re sorting through their own blur of grief. He’s purposely left the portal open for when your own day comes.