Home » Latest » Trending Now » Drunk in Love | Beyoncé | funk cover ft. Kenton Chen

Drunk in Love | Beyoncé | funk cover ft. Kenton Chen

4

InfoSearched 75 0 Trending Now

8.8

SaveSavedRemoved 4

A five-piece funk band turned Beyoncé’s biggest hit into a Highland Park jam session.

Scary Pockets, the prolific Los Angeles funk collective built around Patreon co-founder Jack Conte and guitarist Ryan Lerman, has made a habit of taking pop and R&B staples and running them through a vintage-keys, pocket-groove filter. Their latest target: Beyoncé’s 2013 smash “Drunk in Love,” reworked with vocalist Kenton Chen out front and a live-in-studio band locked into a syncopated, horn-less funk arrangement. The video, shot at the band’s own headquarters, shows exactly how the sausage gets made — no overdubs hiding behind the edit, just five musicians and three backing vocalists cutting a track in real time.

• Scary Pockets — formed in 2017 by Jack Conte (also of Pomplamoose) and Ryan Lerman — recorded the cover live at Scary Pockets HQ in Highland Park, California, with Kenton Chen on lead vocals.
• The full session lineup includes Conte on keys, Lerman on guitar, Carlin White on drums, Kaveh Rastegar on bass, and backing vocalists Rett Madison, Olivia Kuper Harris and Gabriela Welch.
• The track later appeared on two Scary Pockets compilation releases, ‘Nu Funk’ (2017) and ‘Funk Box’ (2018), after its initial YouTube release.

From Trap-Influenced R&B to Pocket-Driven Funk

Beyoncé’s original “Drunk in Love,” produced with trap hi-hats and a stark, minimal low end, gave Scary Pockets a very different starting point than the doo-wop and swing arrangements associated with other cover acts working the same YouTube space. Instead of retro horns or a big-band chart, the band leaned into a tighter, rhythm-section-first approach: syncopated guitar stabs from Lerman, a vintage keyboard hook from Conte, and a bass-and-drums pocket from Rastegar and White that does the heavy lifting the 808s handled on the original. It’s the same formula Scary Pockets applies week after week to whatever pop or R&B track they’ve picked for that cycle — strip the modern production down and rebuild it as a live groove.

Kenton Chen Takes the Lead

Chen, who has also sung with Scott Bradlee’s Postmodern Jukebox in separate projects, handles the vocal here entirely under the Scary Pockets banner — this arrangement, recording and video were produced independently of Bradlee’s group. His phrasing stays soulful and unhurried against the tighter funk backbone, with Madison, Kuper Harris and Welch stacking harmonies behind him rather than trading verses. The three backing vocalists give the chorus its lift without turning the arrangement into a full choir moment, which keeps the focus on Chen’s lead and the rhythm section’s groove.

Recorded live at Scary Pockets HQ in Highland Park, CA — no click-track polish, just five musicians and three singers cutting the take in one room.

The Team Behind the Camera

Caleb Parker handled both the recording engineering and the mixing and mastering, while Ricky Chavez shot and edited the video — the same behind-the-scenes crew responsible for much of Scary Pockets’ regular output. That consistency is part of why the channel has built a following among fans of funk and soul reinterpretations: the arrangements change every week, but the recording setup and visual style stay recognizable from one cover to the next.

Part of a Bigger Catalog

“Drunk in Love” wasn’t a standalone release for the band — it found a second life on their ‘Nu Funk’ (2017) and ‘Funk Box’ (2018) compilation albums before hitting the usual streaming platforms. For a group built on weekly output, folding a strong single cover into a themed compilation is standard practice, and it’s part of how Scary Pockets has steadily built a catalog deep enough to stand alongside better-known names in the cover-song space that Beyoncé’s originals keep feeding.

Scary Pockets has kept the weekly-release machine running well past this one, but “Drunk in Love” remains one of the clearest examples of what the band does best — take a song built for the club and hand it over to a rhythm section that plays like it’s 1978 in Highland Park.