Rubrics

I don't actually understand how people are listening to albums. I don't understand how we appraise albums. I don't understand how we think about, at different scales, the significance of albums as artworks. For instance in recent mainstream cultural memory, you have the album Tortured Poets Society, to which we all thought: what is it for? It's not really for people to listen to, is it? I mean in the sense of sitting down and listening to the whole thing. It’s not quite background music either. When TPS came out, it was unanimously agreed that it was bad, but it wasn’t totally clear what we meant by this. Was anyone actually listening to the whole thing? I doubt it. If anything the reception of the album told us that we’re becoming lazier listeners; our critical faculties aimed sloppily in criss-crossed directions of aesthetics, gossip, and nostalgia. We can’t blame our end of the handoff too severely either: in the Biden years, we’ve been increasingly served huge, indulgent autobiographical efforts that are amazingly produced and overstuffed with useless anecdotal information (vis-à-vis Antonoff). Most American pop celebrities’ latest efforts play like the streaming equivalent of a doom scroll, arresting us in a state of comfortable boredom, hazy amusement, and a secret feeling that we’re smarter than what we’re consuming. How, then, can we be asked to critique any of this?

In the current field of popular music, if an album isn’t a sprawling, incoherent statement of where a well-established artist is “at” in their life and career, it’s usually a collection of songs that relate to one another more so as aesthetic rubrics, suggestions, as palettes, as hybrid song-gestures that dig a niche. The contemporary album by an emerging artist in pop or avant-pop or otherwise functions as a proof of concept. Demonstrations of what the artist might do for a more devised album right around the corner, of what sonic palettes or poetic concerns they perhaps would arrive at in a more realized form given that they have the opportunity to advance professionally. What music criticism talks about as delightfully “open” qualities of these works, the jouissance of completing the work as a listener, (“I relished how the act of my listening completed the work!”) or the jubilant suspensions of judgment they offer due to their paucity, we all know these albums are symptoms of a crippling financialisation of music production, of the speculative moodboarding of things superseding the value of the work itself (look no further than Brat). In this sense too there is an impossibility of constructive critique precisely because it has been built into the project from the outset. Should every 180, every move which thumbs its nose at its form, every celebratory moment of bad taste, every contradiction or mashing of disparate genres really be taken as affirmation that we live in a progressive moment for music? Or should it have us take pause to consider the supposed radicality of these gestures amounts to little more than an end in itself?

Your Day Will Come by Chanel Beads is, in some ways, a perfectly packaged effort for a particular sort of music consumer in their mid to late 20’s, a 1994 to ‘97 baby, the kind of person for whom the stagnant years in music from 2015 to 2020 are still fresh–as is the fever dream of the immediate, libidinal post-pandemic years, which one hoped would crack the lull of things but which afterward resulted mostly in glances exchanged between old coke buddies at Clandestino every now and then. Your Day Will Come offers a possible answer to a deprived output, sociality, and critical capacity in the music world, and times nicely with the incipient sophistication of people pushing 30 who, depending on how hard they went, are only now shaking off the hangover of a hedonic Dimes era.

On the surface, what Chanel Beads has managed to do during their brief but buzzy existence has arguably had one of the most transformative effects on the sociality of New York City music in recent memory. Anyone who’s kept tabs on the rather mid handful of “Dimes Square” acts, the core grouping identified in a 2023 Nylon article as Blaketheman1000, The Dare, and Frost Children, would be aware that Chanel Beads is a much lauded item for this circle, while distinctly emerging outside of their peer group. The affinity for Beads amongst the clumsily defined “Dimes” artists surely has something to do with envy for their situation, having only to beat the allegations of potential one-hit-wonder status with their buzzy Spotify algorithm track “Ef” instead of having to account for a trifle of embarrassing clout moves that have little to do with any coherent music identity or artistry.

It’s no wonder that someone like Harrison of The Dare would break from his usual Instagram story cycle of hamming up in Gucci suits– looking at once happily feted and existentially moot–to repost announcements from Chanel Bead’s profile. While Harrison and a slew of other music people jumped the ship of grimey, Nietszche-coded Myrtle-Wyckoff D.I.Y. barracks for the discount Warholian Dimes Square spotlight, Chanel Beads cooked in silence for just a moment longer; and after letting the comedown of Dimes set in, Beads have devised an image and sound that is relatively uncompromising and culturally exciting without any need to stoop to idiot PR antics. For the troupe of Dimes musicians, Chanel Beads is the site of projection for what could have been, the gulp and tough swallow that the descriptors “Downtown” or “Dimes”, required whether in order to flaunt or self deprecate, didn’t have to be a part of the publicity equation in the first place to get the music heard.

At the other end of things, Beads and Your Day Will Come suggest that new forums, fields of listenership and critique have arrived in its wake. A number of platforms and internet-based labels that possess aesthetic and proprietary presentations nested in markedly contemporary attitudes that participate in, shape, and remark on the act of consuming music in the 2020’s have developed over the past few years and come into prominence around the same time as the release of Your Day Will Come. Shortly after the release of YDWC, Nina Protocol, the music platform distributing bespoke underground music as editioned digital objects, dropped the most engaging version of its platform in mobile-app form. Similarly, the elusive Substack, Soundcloud, and Youtube-based quasi music blog Madjestic Kasual began to thrust its social media presence forth into the visibility of the many, meanwhile releasing episodes of its thorough, smarmy in-house podcast, Cloutfarm, featuring a slew of emerging and longtime vanguard musicians. Elsewhere, the small yet Soundcloud-popular label Deleted, released its quiet gem of a compilation, Almost Every Day, showcasing the spectrum of its deft post-poptimist roster. And, not for nothing, Nick Scavo of Flavortone, the Ridgewood podcast threading philosophical jargon through conversations dealing with popular and institutionally-housed experimental musics, is at MoMA PS1 programming art world-sanctioned subaltern acts for this summer’s Warmup. The fact that Chanel Beads has brushed shoulders with–if not amplified these corners by way of encountering them–signals that their early career has helped codify what might otherwise be regarded as disparate expressions of an avant garde alienated from one another. Your Day Will Come has, put simply, set the table for a new attitude.

But is this a ‘new’ attitude, all things considered? In a certain way, the sphere of music that YDWC may galvanize inherits an older blogosphere vernacular, one that cleaves off from where IndieSleaze began. While the new wave of IndieSleaze represents a tightly controlled apparatus of performative chaos, Chanel Beads and co. offer a continuation of a particular 2000’s logic, the spontaneity of which is genuinely threatening to the popular ideology of the present. It’s significant that this end of things has little political import to it, doesn’t explicitly refute or pander to anything socially–unlike the Dime’s corner’s predicating itself on a counterposition to ‘boredom’ or ‘elites’ or, like, ‘not partying.’ Beads’s nebulous but atmospherically potent sphere is, in one way, fanged in its refusal to explain itself. On the other hand, it presents an updated stylization of things that can be traced back to Alex G’s corner, a cushy, touch-the-grass affect, an aesthetic of vulnerability that Chanel Beads has advanced as a formalist concern.

If, for a politically destabilized generation post 2016, Alex G provided an outlet to share an affinity for a simpler time and its music by way of the Song–not as a vehicle of narrative or identity per se, but as a particular compositional framework offering a humble and equivocal manifestation of beauty–Chanel Beads, and perhaps its peers, have embarked on a journey to bring the formalist concerns that undergird this project and its listenership to task. It is perhaps due time to present such a challenge. Alex G, while developing strongly as a songwriter and producer over the course of his latest albums, is patently awesome but just and only awesome. That Alex G also happens to be cringe at this point isn’t necessarily due to the music or its presentation in and of itself, but rather the lack of presentation; the ambivalence towards managing optics or even hinting at ideological leanings has allowed the music to take on a life that is perhaps below its paygrade. Anyone who has seen G on tour recently knows that the shows feel curiously fratty, and by the same token, at other points excruciatingly Beta-full. It’s clear this music is born out of a time when perhaps it was enough to dress in hand-me-downs, have your sister paint the album art, and reek of Philly. This in and of itself was enough to signal a rarity, a kind of anti-aesthetic utopia. Plus, the songs were fantastic. The oversight of this, of course, was that it allowed for a listenership to feel rewarded in its own passivity, reify its Gen X parent’s youths, and sit at an impasse where nursing a seventeen dollar Yuengling at Elsewhere is enough to ask of music. On the other hand, the angsty sibling with a castration complex that these conditions produced is, of course, the over-coded second wave of IndieSleaze, which has, albeit in a proactive way, embarrassed the very underground it hoped to restore.

If lacking the wherewithal to image itself properly was the handicap of Alex G and associated indie rock acts of the 2010s, Beads has avoided permitting the vacuum that its antecedents overlooked by working economically with hype and image production, sidestepping certain world or character-building cliches many artists perform on social media to opt for a designed, slickly incidental presence.

The community of listeners that Chanel Beads implies and propagates is one that may luxuriate in the same musical pleasures as those belonging to Alex G’s early fanbase, yet who have a profoundly different relationship to the co-creation and dissemination of semiotic chains in music culture. If Alex G encourages a disposition of faux humbleness and unconcern, Chanel Beads teases out a listenership that is almost paranoid in its discretion of taste. Weirdly enough, Beads’s appeal to a kind of steadfast hipster logic lends itself more readily to a Midwest or current left-of-center European background than to a New York/Los Angeles coastal Liberal Arts College pipeline milieu. One can infer that the tightly-knit aesthetic world that Beads has woven must appeal to listeners who were compelled by a specific combination of adolescent boredom and internet access to use music as a site for curatorial maneuvers, understanding the medium of music itself as a kind of commodity fetishism par excellence rather than as a vehicle for rituals of fantasizing about an outside to such relations. For someone who consumes music for these reasons, not as a means of escapism or absolution, but rather as a means by which one might populate a field of aesthetic affinities using the sounds, visuals, and parasocial tools of one’s present material conditions, Chanel Beads represents an anachronistic, belated, but all the same urgent realization of such a rubric.

If Alex G’s hegemony over contemporary Indie represented a politics of radical embarrassment, upturning the shame of 90’s whiteness in music, Chanel Beads goes a step further to catch up with the present. Chanel Beads’s music might be characterized as post-embarrassment, which differs from post-irony, because this music reaches, expands, questions, rather than lands on a desiccated patch of dying-laughter realism. Whereas Alex G doesn’t know what to do with the Visual, Chanel Beads tries. Glancing at their band Instagram, one sees: they’re kind of hot. They dress in dark clothes. They partake in the growing trend of tasteful acts including a violin player on stage. They’ve pulled stunts lending itself to an IRL audience-formation, such as a gig played in a trespassed tunnel last summer. In general they maintain an active but oblique presence on the Gram. If Alex G helped a generation deal with their squeamishness over liking the beautiful qualities of a folk to indie historical tradition during a tumultuous period of political self-identification that seemed to pressure a more topical woke music diet, Beads says, “Sure, we all gravitate toward a diverse range of things, some cringe, some sound, while also trying to maintain a certain cool about ourselves—but perhaps it no longer holds value to police these things as a locus of embarrassment.” Both the underground sphere that claims Beads and the IndieSleaze 2.0 moment can be seen as aesthetic expressions dealing with generational weakness and despair. Where the IndieSleaze subject, however, dissimulates her fractured identity within the pageantry of pure cool, pure party, pure chaos, Beads suggests a state of identification with the ontology of failure, or of disrupted social processes that persist despite themselves, or bygone attitudes in sound cross pollinating with the new.

There are certain obvious allegiances struck between the affect Beads peddles and that of the contemporary frontrunners of British art music a la Dean Blunt, Bar Italia, Joanne Robertson, Still Houseplants, in their arty, gloomy dispositions. Similarities also occur in the sonic experiences of these musics. One of these formal similarities that Your Day Will Come conveys is a pervasive sense of incompleteness. Each piece on the album feels as if it evaporates after having just started. This creates an almost hallucinatory effect of feeling that each track continues for a bit longer in one’s imagination. While each track is cut short in this way, the textures are in stark focus, shaping an experience in which every element populating the music is registered and familiarized to the listener even as it cuts prematurely. What these conditions also produce is a sense of multiplicity within a given track–we hear the song itself but then also the set of ideas and musical codes that exist in discrete forms, locked into self-similarity briefly under the auspices of a minor anthem, chorus, hook. Many times it feels like we are thinking and composing along with producer Shane Lavers, and inhabiting the same world of presented interests, obstacles, and solutions of his process. Each song, in an odd way, feels like merely an avatar standing in for a deferred idea or gesture that exists outside of the framework of the music. At its best, the effect of the music disappearing on arrival is a total gut punch, an awareness of making a sympathetic connection with the musical conventions of a track, appreciating it via its appeal to familiar codes of avant-pop of indie genre logic, and then witnessing one's own listening faculties continuing in this manner once the song ends mid-sentence, catching bare consciousness like a deer in headlights. By the same token, this relationship the music of YDWC creates with the listener can feel dull after a while, cynical in its mic-drop attitude once a given track succeeds in crafting a mood and then capitulates immediately after.

The algorithm of the overall mood of this music might be described as a conceptual half-smoked cigarette, or a rare enjoyable hangover where one’s thoughts struggle to form coherently, yet all the while discovering a sexiness in this form of impotence. This seems to have sympathies with the lot of British art music of the present–again, Dean Blunt, Bar Italia, etc.– to which there is a deflecting Yacht Rock-ness in sound and feel. Polite and at ease, lazily strumming a chorus-laden guitar, but all the while stuck-up behind its deference. Something about this strain of music that says Yeah idiot, I’ll bet that you think I’m so relaxed, you know why I’m this relaxed? Because I’m about to fucking kill myself, that’s why.

The attitude that comes through the music of YDWC isn’t quite this, though. Your Day Will Come succeeds in walking the tightrope between this forced-blasé kind of music- making and something else, giving it a sense of depth while also remaining vibe-forward. There is a breezy, shrugging quality to some of the deskilled articulations of musical phrasings, but the arrangements of real and midi strings soar beyond ready-made themes and motifs that music of this ilk might normally get away with. There’s seemingly no attempt with the orchestral instrumentation of the album to participate in classicism, and yet the chord profiles of the strings are often rich and discerning in their statements. There are cliched strategies for creating tension here, liberal application of seventh chords and the like, but the subjunctive mood of this album is created more so by intensely pressurized repetition in the riffs and chord progressions within punishingly short durations, as if the musical figures here were rotating in a microwave. The result is an embodied sense of yearning.

That the melancholic signature of YDWC is produced not by dipping into tweeness, or Pavement-esque cerebral-but-incompetent pathos, but rather conveyed by well-placed formalist moves, is an exciting development in contemporary underground pop. This music is odd in a way antithetical to how much hyperpop or deconstructed club positions itself as ‘weird’ merited by its rapid channel-switching of genres and sound-design proclivities. There is a means of dealing with incongruities in YDWC, but it’s not geared to end up with a perfect frankenstein object of various nostalgias, or a clever re-presentation of the non-musical in a musical context to signal a vague philosophical conceit. Rather, the production of Your Day Will Come seems to continuously admit that it is unsatisfied with itself. The music sounds like it exists in a secondary order in relation to the germ of its originating gesture, or thought, or will. When the last song ends, there is barely a sense of closure. We are suspended in the suggestions of the music indefinitely.