On a Saturday night in early autumn in Minneapolis, there’s a lot of choices of what to do. I was lucky enough to head to Zhora Darling to see Chanel Beads with Maria Somerville opening.

Making her Minneapolis debut, Irish singer & songwriter Maria Somerville started the evening. Having self-released music since 2018, she had her debut album Luster, with British record label 4AD released here in 2025. The trio (vocals/guitar, bass/backing vocals/electronic music, and drums) started almost completely in the dark, fitting the shoegaze / electronic rock genre. It was a very slow build up on the first song, with drummer on padded sticks, and the guitars increasing in volume through that quiet number. A quick “thanks and hello” led to a louder and more dissonant sound, with Somerville’s vocals coming in over all of that fuzzed noise. This easily could have been mistaken for Lush at first pass, meaning this was fine shoegaze rock.

Somerville was the center of gravity and pretty compelling figure throughout the set. The drummer (Ethan Johnson) spent part of a song using the tip of his drum stick to scratch along his cymbals, if that gives you a sense of what they were doing. A quick introduction of the band and Somerville was back into the quiet and pulsating guitars of the next song. She had a quiet intensity that was perfectly suited to the performance side of the music, which helped move this up a level. I’m unsure if the near total darkness was an optimal choice, but there was a definite aesthetic Maria Somerville had going on, and I appreciate artists who go for a specific vibe. A late set number was the most fully vocal/sung one, showing off Somerville’s chops as a vocalist. Projections was loud while simultaneously drawing the audience in closer. An extended instrumental with both guitarist and bassist on knees furiously working at their pedal boards was the long set up to the final number. Maria Somerville finished on a loud and distorted sound, then quickly headed off stage.

Chanel Beads came on as the headliner. Chanel Beads is the band name for Shane Lavers, who released the album Your Day Will Come in 2024. Coming on as a quartet (vocals, guitar/backing vocals, violin, percussion/electronic music), Chanel Beads also went with a low lighting aesthetic, this time with construction set light in the far back corner. The band had a long warm up number that got the crowd going. By the time Lavers started singing (with a lot of jumping and moving around the stage), the dynamic of the band was clear. Lavers was the high energy front man, with Maya McGory, the guitarist and back up vocalist, really holding down the fort. Sonically, this was indie rock with some electronica and shoegaze tendencies and the mix of electronic instrumentation with “normal” ones was pretty interesting. That percussion work from Tchad C actually drove a lot of the numbers, but more as leading edge than backing support. It was a fascinating on stage dynamic and it built in some unexpected ways. With Zachary Paul introduced on violin for “a hometown show”, Lavers took guitar duties but also handed off lead vocals to Maya McGory, which provided a distinctly different sound.

With several members of the band headed out into the audience at different times along with the small height of the stage, this created less of an audience & band separation. And when the next song started and the audience basically took lead vocals, Lavers let them and that moment was a great example of what live music can be. Shifting to an unreleased song, the crowd was in full dance mode. The interplay between Lavers and McGory on vocals was a plus, adding a layer of harmony on top of that fairly complicated music. Paul was busy on violin, providing a top layer sound on the latter songs. Although Chanel Beads were playing a lot of new songs, the second they hit an older one, the audience was fully singing along. The first real bit of talking by Lavers noted “we have a few more”, and it was clear Chanel Beads had been flying through their set. The percussionist headed back into the crowd causing an absolute uproar and Lavers started playing some sort of electronic wind instrument in a longer instrumental section. A final song had the stage going completely dark before that minimal lighting returned. Playing “one more” without ever leaving stage, Chanel Beads closed on a happy high, with band members eventually heading out to mingle with the crowd.