Shanghai’s underground is like a washing machine that never stops, says Jonas Klein, as he presents an in-depth report on the city’s extraordinary musical infrastructure, and picks out five key releases – from the former pop star re-booting the Bristol sound to a hell-bath of distorted drone
“Another one of these, please,” I tell the bartender in Chinese, pointing at their self-brewed beer. I look down at my cup and see this slogan: “Shanghai is a bitch, Shanghai is a washing machine”. I chuckle at the image. It’s odd, but somehow it all makes sense: this bar, the OKOK Club, is where Shanghai’s underground spins its dirty laundry clean. New bands, old punks, foreigners, locals, passers-by, tumbled together until something comes out fresh. The walls are plastered with quirky décor. An ayi – an affectionate term for an elderly woman – cooks noodles in the back all night, feeding drunk musicians as if they were her own grandchildren. It is one of the places you go when all other clubs have already closed. You expect nothing, and then stumble into the best jam sessions of your life, whether as a listener or a player. When I first entered, I instantly felt at home. Arriving here was pure chance: I met the French band that brought me here at a post-rock gig at Cream Club – another hidden gem.
Whereas OKOK often brings expats and Chinese people together to improvise on rock or jazz classics, Cream is a gritty cellar that hosts a bit of everything. From dark trip hop, solo noise artists, American emo band Algernon Cadwallader to raw punk featuring a costumed singer and a kid dancing onstage with a plastic gun, every night holds a surprise. Situated in Pudong, opposite the Bund, it also offers the iconic skyline view of Shanghai. On a not so busy Thursday night, Charlie Tan, who books acts for Cream Club, tells me that the place opened just a year ago. Once a billiards hall, Cream, like OKOK, symbolises a new frontier of small venues, letting young artists test the waters of the city’s underground.
Two years before, Tan had played with his veteran post rock band 21 Grams during one of the last shows at Yuyintang’s legendary “Little White Building”, Shanghai’s lighthouse for underground music. Up till then, it had been a training spot for many of the greats of Chinese indie: prog folk perfectionists Omnipotent Youth Society, garage trio Hedgehog, krautrock-inspired Carsick Cars and more. CNN once said: “New York had CBGB; Shanghai has Yuyintang.” They weren’t exaggerating. Throughout its 20 year history, it became more than a concert hall. It was a place where indie fans would spend endless nights partying while drinking cheap Qingdao beer. New bands would spring out of its soil. Rookies glimpsed what lies beneath the surface of mainstream pop. The original location closed in 2024 — but Yuyintang didn’t die. It relocated, expanded, and under manager Zhang Haisheng’s steady hand, kept spinning.
‘Lao Zhang’ – as he’s known to most – once said to local magazine Xinmin Weekly: “Do you know how Kurt Cobain died? He got sick and died. It was related to the health problems he suffered from his early years of poverty.” The quote perfectly illustrated his philosophy: “Survival is the greatest idealism.” It kept the venue running for decades, without forsaking its indie spirit. Now in his 50s, this unassuming guy still runs it with the same mix of pragmatism and love for inventive music. For emerging bands, it’s not only the city’s high costs that make survival so hard: “Our audience, local Shanghainese account for no more than 10 per cent. Shanghai is a city of migrants.” Lao Zhang told the magazine The Paper a few years ago. It explains why building a dedicated fanbase can be harder in Shanghai than in smaller cities. It also adds to the relevance of clubs like Yuyintang. They provide an irreplaceable entry playground for newcomers.
Prior to 2004 those playgrounds practically did not exist. Not in Shanghai, and hardly anywhere else in China. There was ARK. There was the hardcore punk den at Yuyintang’s future Longcao Road spot. And from 2007 to 2016, there was The Shelter – a dark, moldy bomb shelter that birthed a whole electronic underground, chronicled here before. But a proper live network? That came with Lao Zhang’s white building. In the days before it, indie was still in its wild infancy: the country’s only big festival, Midi, did not require any entrance fee and the term “Livehouse” – now common for professional indie venues around Asia – only existed in Japan. 22 years later, the landscape has transformed profoundly: Big venues like MAO Livehouse or Modern Sky Lab regularly host acts like Mac DeMarco as well as domestic veterans. Nearly every bigger city features two or three-day-festivals and thanks to the recent success of The Big Band – a TV show featuring some of China’s most interesting indie bands, more and more people come to see shows.
Sometimes this can lead to irritation. In Beijing’s School Bar, the fresh crowd of TV-viewers once could not endure more than five minutes of its ‘Noise Monday’ – an experimental music event series. At Yuyintang, bands often start a little later than announced, unlike pop artists. After all, looseness is part of the indie ethos. One day, I stumbled upon a jam session there. Not by some random musicians, but by Shanghai Qiutian – one of the city’s most exciting exports. The duo was playing itself into ecstatic swells of mathy rhythms while singing randomly about Chinese noodles. An attentive crowd of about 40 young Chinese people were sitting around them. You could feel that they belonged there: it was Yuyintang where they once met on an open stage. Now they sell out clubs across China, but that spirit of grassroots, of music by and for equals, so ingrained into Zhang Haisheng’s indie mecca, seems to have lived on in them. Of course, you can take the looseness too far: perform drunk and Lao Zhang will scold you. All of this is part of a culture you cannot just grasp because you liked a punk band on a casting show. The spirit has to be lived. Through nights of cheap beer and unlikely friendships, through sudden discoveries made on a rainy Thursday, and through too many cigarettes.
That French band that showed me OKOK Club? They are called Nova Noir and I did see them again at a venue four times the size of OKOK. And then another time at a huge festival in Tianjin. That is the ladder. That is what Lao Zhang built the bottom rung for. And to quote him one last time: “I think Chinese bands must go out. They can’t always stay here, being frogs at the bottom of a well.”
The artists featured in this article have all taken this to heart, in different ways. One wandered all around China, while his debut still rattles the speaker of All, another left for her home province of Guizhou, haunting the city’s concrete walls. One spun from Shanghai to Switzerland and back again, replenished. One never left but tumbled the city’s sounds together to advocate for its sunny side. And one – a former pop star – found herself not despite the city but within it, a torch held steady in the spin.
The washing machine never stops. But sometimes, if you listen close, you can hear who stepped out.
That Ai Ni (“Love you”) exists at all is a small miracle: Shanghai Qiutian were on the verge of breaking up, just as they’d found their identity on their second LP. In 2023, everything collapsed: Singer/guitarist Wang Yi went through mental health struggles, they encountered problems with local authorities and ultimately, lost the joy of making music at all. You can hear the pain in Ai Ni, but what you also hear throughout is what in German is called ‘Aufbruchsstimmung’– optimism, hope. Ai Ni sounds like a band ready to conquer the world. Eight years ago this musical ‘Aufbruch’ was merely a side hustle for two guys who’d just arrived in Shanghai. Eñaut Martí Zinkunegi (aka Wang Yi) came from a Basque village of only 500 people, and initially expected to stay two months. But this metropolis did not let him go: He started a music school, met the perfect drummer, invited him in before they finally decided to switch the classrooms for stages all across the country.
Success came. But, for two foreigners singing in Mandarin, maybe not the way they expexted. As drummer Florian Rudin (who goes by Lu Feiyan in Chinese) told me, they’d once got a venue packed in London – not by Europeans but nearly entirely by members of the city’s Chinese diaspora. The owners were speechless. Without Shanghai, none of this would have happened: For them it was “the playground” where “everything is possible if you try hard enough,”. And yet it was a love that proved hard to sustain: On Ai Ni’s second track ‘Shanghai’, Wang Yi processes it by shouting his raw anger and devotion in the same breath. Rudin meanwhile quietly settled on the city’s outskirts, growing vegetables. Funnily enough, when I played a “guess this song” game with him during an interview, he couldn’t even guess the title of his own solo track, ‘Farmer’s Politics’ – but he could explain an Aikido move in great detail. It seems no great stretch to say his many hobbies provided an anchor – perhaps necessary for the band’s survival.
What ultimately saved them, though, was a retreat to Rudin’s Swiss hometown, deep in nature. There they rediscovered what started it all: The love of playing, their undeniable chemistry. In a few weeks, they had 27 songs – their most diverse collection yet. And their best. Ai Ni veers from quirky punk anthems (‘Henan’) to hectic jazz, from vulnerable emo to Swiss folk elegy (‘Urs’). The latter came from a funeral they attended mid-recording. Someone sang this serene song with such ardor that they left it unedited on the album. “Ai Ni means unconditional love,” Wang Yi says. “Even for our haters.” On stage, he now hugs band members mid-set. It shows that although Shanghai may become a new home, it sometimes takes a retreat 5,000 miles away to rekindle that love.
If you were listing the key artists of Shanghai’s underground, you’d be crazy not to include ChaCha. She fronted the legendary dub combo Uprooted Sunshine in the 2000s and became the first featured artist on Svbkvlt – one of the city’s most respected labels for weird electronics – with a purely instrumental ambient album as Faded Ghost. When Shelter closed in 2016, an era faded for her too. In 2019, she readopted her birth name Yehaiyahan and returned to the mountainous inner province of Guizhou.
Far from Shanghai’s high-speed jungle, she reconnected with something more grounded: learning from Tibetan musicians and spending time among Guizhou’s indigenous communities. The 2024 album What A WildRide – made with her new band 梦马WildRide – saw her leaning into earthy soundscapes and dark techno beats. Not all of this lands. It is her 2025 collaborations with Brazilian singer Tulipa Ruiz that prove she can still surprise; here their complementing Portuguese and Chinese vocals are wrapped in soundbeds of neo soul (‘Alongo’) or serene indigenous folk (‘Caule de Bambu’). Yehaiyahan may have left Shanghai, but her ghost remains moving through its concrete walls. She no longer needs to be here to be felt. The flicker of the torch she left may have already summoned somebody new.
To listen to Chillgogog feels like digging out Shanghai’s best kept secret in a hidden record store. From crate-digging to working in one is also how Xiao Bing (aka FunkeeCookee) began her music obsession. Together with rapper Latenine6 she deepened the passion by building not one but two labels: Eating Music and Delivery Music. The cosplaying of being a food chain did not stop there: their 2024 debut Motivations TO-GO came in charming food bags with fake receipts, made with such care you’d buy it for the sheer absurdity alone. The album itself is a quirky collage of funky grooves, intricate IDM, SpongeBob samples, and the Suzhou-Shanghai nursery rhyme “卖糖粥” (Selling Sugar Porridge). “Personally, I feel most of the new music in the Chinese region is a bit too emo or excessively deep,” Xiao Bing has said. Against that backdrop, Chillgogog’s playful, childlike approach feels almost radical. In a scene that often mistakes darkness for depth, it paints a wonderfully contrasting image of what living and growing up in Shanghai feels like, apart from all alienation: sometimes, it is the joy of watching cartoons together and eating overly sweet porridge on a tropical summer day.
Splitting his time between brutal dancefloor bangers and ambient experiments, 444thegod is one of Shanghai’s most interesting talents to emerge in recent years. While his 2025 EP Oxygen Activation pierced ears with bulldozing drum & bass, his 2026 LP Reseda Odorata returns to tranquility. Rather than telling a coherent story, he warps memories of time and space, “like the tesseract in Interstellar“, as his label describes it. Distorted cicadas, taxi alerts, and poetry readings become emotional triggers, wrapped in trance, soothing piano chords, and even a ‘Call Me Maybe’ singalong. One memory – the passing of a family member – may have manifested in the title track’s 30-minute hell-bath of distorted drones and processed grief. It is not an easy listen. It is not meant to be. Though most of Reseda took shape in his home province of Shanxi, Shanghai left its mark on 444thegod precisely because his few memories of the city became his most meaningful. It was Shanghai’s Genome6.66Mbp that released his debut. Sometimes the ghost of the city arrives only in flashbacks – returning one to times and places far away.
Ma Lu’s story, as I learn spending an evening with her, is unlike any other musician in China. She started as a professional pop singer in Shanghai, appearing on the country’s biggest casting shows, before abandoning the path of saccharine commercialism entirely. Out of a newfound love for trip hop and techno (the focus of her upcoming LP), she teamed up with producer Yan Jun to make Dandelion (2023). In a city where you can hear Massive Attack’s Mezzanine play in every second tucked-away bar, she’s the rare Chinese artist actually reinfusing the Bristol sound with life.
The album’s title and cover suggest her journey: a dandelion seed drifting away from fake stardom, looking for somewhere real to land. You can hear that reclaiming throughout. ‘Màn Yán’ (‘Spreading’) is a beautifully unfolding plea for honest connection in a city of surfaces. ‘Làng Cháo’ (‘Tide’) builds dense, anxious soundscapes — like a wave you either ride or drown in. And then there is ‘Candle’: a song that finds redemption through discovering warm roots not in another person but within herself. If you’d seen her hypnotic stage presence, you’d feel compelled to follow her into the darkness: “black liquid growing purer,” she sings on ‘Tide’ her voice shifting from soulful croons to breathy whispers. Her arc from commercial pop to electronics mirrors Shanghai itself—a place where identities dissolve and regrow, like the endless turns of a washing machine.
