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Remembering The Suburbs’ Beej Chaney, 1957–2025
An underappreciated figure in American new wave is gone
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…