Edgy rave undertones and sweet ethereal melodies: meet NeonHoney
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As her name suggests, NeonHoney’s unique sound is in a state of constant duality, from its edgy rave undertones to its sweet ethereal melody that seems to intertwine seamlessly.
It’s the kind of music you want to hear while driving with the windows down, dreaming of a world that is far away from cold Canberra. Her new single, Lucid, is the first track to be released from her six-track EP Chasing Shadows, allowing audiences to step inside the mysterious and hauntingly beautiful world of Chantelle Milin.
Her natural affinity for songwriting was born at an early age. She describes her first microphone as a deodorant can, and her audience a sold-out imaginary show of tens of thousands in her bedroom. As I chatted with Chantelle, it became clear she was always destined to become an artist.
“I’ve been playing guitar since I was 10, and I’ve been singing forever,” she says
“You couldn’t get me to shut up. I’ve just been singing forever, and I always knew that this was going be my career.”
Her artistry continued to evolve and transform, moving away from her heavy metal roots and morphing her sound into this postmodern remix, sending us on this endless loop of nostalgia, memory and rhythmic repetition.
“I was the lead singer of a metal band, and I was listening to all the heavy music when I was younger. So, you hear a lot of the influences come through.”
“With my progressions, it’s a mix between that heavy progressive kind of style and acoustic rock alternative. I don’t really like mainstream music that much; I like to be different.”
Her new single Lucid, is the love child of COVID lockdown. While the rest of us were baking bread and drinking too much wine, NeonHoney was exploring the various layers of her subconscious.
“I’m a lucid dreamer,” Chantelle explains.
“I’ve had some pretty elaborate dreams, and I have been known to sleepwalk a lot. I have strange parasomnia, and things happen to me when I go to sleep, and so I’ve got a connection with that. For Lucid, I was inspired by the idea of meeting the love of your life in your dreams.”
Her work brings to life the creativity that lives within our subconscious which sometimes begins with simply pressing record and waiting for the magic to happen.
“Generally, how I record is just I’ll just kind of start the song from start to finish and just record as I go to a metronome. Then adding wires at the end, I’ll do like a bass kind of like piano and vocals and then keep adding layers over the top.”
As you make your way throughout Chantelle’s body of work, there’s a spontaneous, human quality that binds her sound together, like a poem jotted down on the way to the bank. And as Chantelle explains, her work isn’t rigidly planned but rather guided by the abstract landscapes of the psyche and emotions.
“Each song is an individual piece, but they are mostly surrounded around love, romance and self-improvement. I’m just naturally a moody person anyway, so when I’m feeling down, I tend to write songs a bit more harrowing.”
For this self-made female powerhouse —whose sound defies easy categorisation—Chantelle shows no intention of slowing down, determined to make her sultry pop, au courant sound well known across the ACT, and your playlists.
“[In the future] I would like to be playing shows with well-known artists and touring around Australia. Even overseas, that would be fantastic. And just networking with some great people in the industry and getting my name out there.”
