Nightlife's New Wave

Though better known for its bottle-service clubs, an underground music and dance scene is now thriving in Hong Kong

- Christopher Dewolf

It’s Friday night in Hong Kong and the crowds are filling the streets around Lan Kwai Fong. Pushing through the throngs of people, you pass a procession of bars pounding out Top 40 hits and EDM remixes. It’s a lot of fun if you’re 18 years old (the legal drinking age in Hong Kong), but what about the rest of us?

“Hong Kongers are generally more interested in money than music, so we don’t have the really mature scenes you see in other big cities, like London or New York,” says Adam Wright, the longtime entertainment editor of the South China Morning Post. Thanks to sky-high rents, “venues have massive costs to cover, which means they need to move a lot of bottles, so they tend to target the VIP and bottle-service crowd and cater to their tastes in music. This crowd generally isn’t into very cutting-edge dance music.”

But don’t despair. “The underground scene has really exploded in recent years,” Wright says. There are more local music producers than ever, more underground nights, and a new wave of venues that care less about emptying your pockets than they do about playing good music.

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