Laurent Wery: Why a Live Banjo Works on Beautiful Face
A Belgian Producer, an Iranian Vocalist, and Two Minutes Thirty-Two of Vocal House
There is a banjo on Beautiful Face. Not a sampled one, and not a plucked synth patch standing in for one, but a played instrument tracked for the record. Laurent Wery drops it into a commercial vocal house arrangement that runs two minutes and thirty-two seconds. It is the most interesting engineering decision on the track.
Beautiful Face sits in the playlist below, and Laurent Wery’s coverage across this network is collected on his artist profile. The single reached us through PopHits.Co Music Charts, which verifies independent artists and places their releases across its network of music news titles. Press play and stay with it.
The Wave This Track Is Riding
Acoustic strings in four-to-the-floor dance music is not a new move. It became a template after 2013, when bluegrass picking over a house tempo turned into one of the decade’s most durable ideas. The approach has been in the toolkit ever since.
It keeps working for functional reasons rather than fashionable ones. A banjo’s attack is fast, and its energy sits mostly between roughly 200 Hz and 2 kHz. That puts it above the sub and below the top of the vocal. It is the part of the spectrum a dance arrangement usually leaves thin, because the kick owns the bottom and the hats own the air. Put a banjo figure in that gap and it reads as a lead line with no equalisation fight.
The second reason is timing. Programmed plucks land exactly on the grid. A played banjo does not. Those few milliseconds of human drift stop a bright repeating figure sounding mechanical over a locked tempo. On Beautiful Face the picking pattern is the hook you leave with, and it carries the human information in a track whose drums sit hard on the grid.
Where Laurent Wery Fits In That Wave
Laurent Wery is not new to this end of the floor. The Belgian DJ and producer works out of Sint-Niklaas and released this single through BIP Records. Internationally he is best known for Hey Hey Hey. He puts his influences between 1990s eurodance and country. That stops sounding like an odd pairing the moment you hear where the banjo sits.
The runtime matters as much as the instrumentation. Two minutes thirty-two is a streaming edit, not a set tool. Beatport carries an extended mix for anyone programming a floor. The version most people hear is built for a playlist: it front-loads its hook and gets out. Producers working this lane now routinely deliver both, and the short one is the one that has to survive a skip.
The vocal is Xerxes-K, the working name of Khashayar Sharifian Attar, who sings, writes, produces, mixes and masters his own material. The pairing is the second release from these two, following Good Old Days in 2024, also on BIP Records. Reviewing that one for Rotate Magazine, Osafo Daniel called the vocal the heart of the track. The same reading applies here. The vocal carries the melody; the banjo carries the movement.
How It Was Made, And The Acts Next To It
The pair tracked parts for Beautiful Face across Belgium, the Netherlands and Iran. That is worth stating plainly, because it now describes the ordinary condition of this scene rather than a novelty. A producer in Flanders and a vocalist in Iran can build a record without sharing a room. The only trace of the distance in the finished master is that every part had to be a decision before it travelled.
It also explains the instrument choice. A banjo needs one good room and one good take, and it travels as a single clean stem. That makes it one of the few acoustic sources a remote session can add without importing a whole studio’s worth of problems, which is part of why it keeps turning up on records built this way.
For placement, three names mark the territory. Avicii is the direct technical precedent for acoustic strings over a house tempo, and the reason a banjo on a dance record reads as deliberate rather than eccentric. Lost Frequencies is the nearest Belgian point of comparison, working the same commercial-melodic register out of the same small country. Sam Feldt covers the vocal-led side, where the singer is the subject and the production stays out of the way. All three sit near this record in the site’s house coverage.
The ElectronicMusic.News curator team: “The tell on this record is the arrangement discipline. A banjo is easy to overuse, and most producers who reach for one leave it running through the chorus until it stops being an instrument and becomes wallpaper. Here it drops out where the vocal needs the room and returns on the transition. That is a decision made by someone who has watched a floor respond.”
Writing about the single for Music Evolution, the reviewer put the live banjo and the three-country recording process at the centre of the story, and noted a Tomorrowland set announced for that summer. The single arrived on 28 February 2025 and has stayed in circulation since.
Where To Hear Laurent Wery
Watch the video for Beautiful Face on YouTube and read more at the official site.
Follow Laurent Wery across platforms: Instagram, Facebook, and X.
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