Member-only story

Remembering The Suburbs’ Beej Chaney, 1957–2025

An underappreciated figure in American new wave is gone

Stewart Mason
Three Imaginary Girls
6 min readJan 12, 2025

--

The Suburbs circa 1982; Beej Chaney, center (Photo by Twin/Tone Records)

Amidst the tragic horror of the Los Angeles wildfires this week, a smaller story from southern California has slipped past largely unnoticed. Blaine John “Beej” Chaney, guitarist, singer, and co-frontman of the eternally underrated Minneapolis new wave act The Suburbs, drowned on January 5 while swimming in the Pacific Ocean near his home in Hermosa Beach. He was 67.

The Suburbs looked like they aspired to be an American version of London’s New Romantics, all perfectly draped fashionable suits and complicated haircuts. And in keeping with the blank-faced nihilism popular on the early American new wave scene, they had an absolutely perfect band logo: a circle enclosing a five clones of that pictogram for “men” that appears on public restroom doors. Musically, though, The Suburbs were something else entirely. Mixing the visceral intensity of first-gen punk with a more expansive set of influences that included jazz, funk, British Invasion pop, and even modern classical music, The Suburbs’ music was unclassifiable in its strangeness, but it was also always unexpectedly tuneful and melodic.

Both on stage — The Suburbs were a notoriously tight, compelling live band — and in the studio, The Suburbs’ music was built on the…

--

--

Three Imaginary Girls
Three Imaginary Girls

Published in Three Imaginary Girls

Medium’s sparkly indie-pop press! Music discovery, memoir, mixtapes and more.

Stewart Mason
Stewart Mason

Written by Stewart Mason

From West Texas. In Boston. It’s mostly gonna be music, food, and cats.

Responses (7)