The Hong Kong music that mattered in 2024
Gigs, records and moments that we can't forget, for better or for worse
Because nothing says end-of-year like a group-compiled listicle …
However we are but three people. If we missed something amazing, tell us x
R.I.P. Kitec
The food at the mall’s shit and I feel tired just thinking about getting on a shuttle bus, but with the closure of Kitec there’s no affordable mid-sized venue in the city for bands to book for shows anymore. It’s been a part of my life since I was 16, and I even saw Kraftwerk there with my dad once. The last hurrah in January featured an array of Harbour Records darlings, including shows headlined by My Little Airport and Teenage Riot; I attended the latter. Teenage Riot was, as always, fun and flippant, twee but not cringe (a fine line to tread); at one point they played against a backdrop of a lotus-flower elderly graphic. I zoned out during Reonda’s performance. If by some miracle Kitec reopened (hey), I swear I’ll never complain about it again, especially after having been scarred by the female toilet at Mom Livehouse recently. – KC
Maenad means business
Maenad and the Ravers never fail to make the hairs stand up on the back of my neck. Opera-trained auteur Cecilia Nox and guitarist Ming “Evil Undead” exorcise a frighteningly good sound and practise some of the most exacting, atmospheric stagecraft you’ll experience these days in Hong Kong. Their earlier iteration was darkness-cloaked and evocative of witchy, gloomy acts like Chelsea Wolfe before morphing into something somehow akin to a folk horror Kate Bush, channelling more of an ’80s Cocteau Twins-esque post punk sound that’s paired with pagan headdresses, incense and floral adornments during bewitching performances. Third album Handshold dropped in February, with a higher production polish and songwriting confidence than its predecessors. Like a beautiful, glittering spider poised to deliver a fatal bite by the time it’s too late, tracks like “The Pale King Dream” swirl with a hypnotic psychedelia before the velvet curtain is pierced with howling, feedback-laden guitar. Vinyl, please! – LJ
Un.Tomorrow unveiled, with an epic festival
The two-day affair at HKICC Lee Shau Kee School of Creativity in March marked the launch of a new record label, Un.Tomorrow, and was a greatest hits showcase of names that have dominated the bill this past decade (An Id Signal, Wellsaid, David Boring), newer and already immensely popular bands (Arches) alongside more meandering acts (Butter Nut Squash Waltz, Life Was All Silence). I’m a documented fan of Wong Hin Yan but a live album perhaps isn’t the most intuitive first release for a new label. Will the project prove to be a long-overdue step in consolidating efforts to promote local indie music, or will it, as some online detractors have implied, become yet another feel-good platform run by self-appointed arbitrators of taste (a description that inevitably also applies to this newsletter)? Only time will tell, but, as the Un.Tomorrow boys may say, 做咗先講 (which my brain refuses to translate as anything other than “just do it”). – KC
A Stranded Whale reunion of sorts, in my ex’s living room
There’s a particular outdoors Stranded Whale gig I remember, back when West Kowloon was this quasi-anarchic construction site that was actually the best version of the space; sunlight-drenched, slightly tipsy, I laid flat on the grass as the band played with Taiwanese outfit Cicada, and it’s one of my favourite memories from the period I think of as the Before times in Hong Kong. When Stranded Whale called it quits a few years back, it meant the dissolution of the songwriting duo of Tomii Chan and Jabin Law, who have always had a bit of a (playful?) John Lennon-Paul McCartney rivalry; rumour has it that one year for Christmas, one of them sent the other a card that said, “Happy holidays to the second-best singer-songwriter in Hong Kong.” Jabin’s now based in London, and when he came back for a visit this past March, the pair reunited for an intimate gig in, of all places, my ex-husband’s living room. I love both their solo work, but there is a special kind of magic when they play with and harmonise each other; they finished the set with a Stranded Whale song, “Never Fray”. I’m still sad they broke up. – KC
Virgin Vacation come through on their widdly, windy promise
Honestly, I found it pretty hard to get on board with Virgin Vacation. Their early pandemic-era warehouse groups struck me as proggy and pretentious, cold and abstract, to the point of unrelatability. Their Clockenflap-opening March 2023 show was a self-conscious spectacle, but felt like a decidedly unwieldy (filler?) booking for the main stage. But this year was the year I really got Virgin Vacation – primarily because of a spellbinding September festival set (above), and because they came good on all that leftfield, widdly-windy promise with May’s debut album Dapple Patterns, a dense but groovy, meaty but breezy LP that rewards repeated listens and sounds, at times, in the words of multi-instrumentalist James Hedges like “a bag full of cats all pulling in different directions.” They even flew to Taipei to represent HK at the Golden Indie Music Awards. – RG
An under-the-radar pick for AOTY
In May, I saw That Travis and Jonathan Yang perform at The Old Church in Stoke Newington, London, for the release of the former’s album In the Vastness of Landscape, Whatever Matters – an ambitious venture that included costumes, a McDull skit, and Jonathan and Travis playing each other’s songs in the hallowed space. The show, for all of its theatrics and deliberate haphazardness, was a distraction from the strength of the album itself, and when I revisited the record two months later I was surprised by all its textures and the classical quality of the songwriting. Some guitar parts or vocal lines were reminiscent of old Cantopop and…Radiohead?, and were juxtaposed with futuristic sounds that pull it back from predictability: “1974” felt like it was speaking directly to Björk’s “All Neon Like” – I think Travis followed a performance of this song immediately with a cover of “Unravel” during the gig – and 稻田外（有窗）features the refrain from the old Chinese song 等著你回來. Much of the album felt like it was an exercise in collapsing temporality, and despite the left turns the songs’ emotionality wasn’t compromised for the sake of experimentation. There weren’t all that many albums I replayed this year, and this was one of them. – KC
Keep pouring that tea
One of the most exciting developments on the scene these last few years has been younger curators shaking things up with new show concepts. Rising to the top of this pool of fresh blood is Kelsey Wan, the promoter, musician, zine-maker and label owner behind milkteawithoutmilk, who has a talent for putting on excellently formulated showcases of acts that are so deep underground or caught in such ephemeral stages of exuvia they’ll never be seen in the same form again. The DIY aesthetic of MTWM shows, their marketing and a pay-what-you-can ethos found its audience quickly. Wan’s carefully crafted nights brought in cult international acts like the US’ Teenage Wrist and Chengdu group Sonicave, and ranged from experimental noise to fifth-wave emo (May’s To Fix the Gash in Your Head four-act event flitted from fantastically challenging ambient noise to enveloping shoegaze). Together, they’ve conjured a mood of momentum, creativity and solidarity in a city where such tiny green shoots are so easily stymied. Support MTWM’s output in 2025 to ensure this precious stone keeps rolling. – LJ
Freespace Noise Fest: a bold middle-fingered farewell
At this point, the open secret that muso-in-chief Kung Chi-shing is done at West Kowloon is well and truly out. But the brazen, guns-blazing, daylight heist he pulled on his way out the door was the ultimate fuck you to the purseholders at WKDA. August’s Freespace Noise Fest was a quiet revelation, six days of wild and wacky experimental shows in The Box from visiting and local luminaires – a jolting call to arms of all the sonic possibilities bubbling under the conscious surface if the city just gave a hot-minute to actual artistry. Probably the most exciting thing that happened this year, full stop. The big finale was of course clouded by the fact the main dude of the headliners couldn’t make it, but hey, the real treats had unfolded days earlier.
November’s Freespace Jazz Fest also finally came into its own, despite another bloody typhoon, but I wrote about how the local acts owned it more than the erratic ticketed headliners already elsewhere. Maybe some fresh blood upstairs can actually give that festival the aesthetic focus it deserves. – RG
Long live CT Fest
After the high-jinx, live-wire, half-success of last year’s brave-but-bonkers debut outing – seriously, who puts a music fest on a Star Ferry? – Chez Trente head honcho Joe Lung’s CT Fest took side steps towards legitimacy with a second outing in August, which bundled a bunch of typically jazzy and hipster-approved acts incongruously across three stages in Trilogy. It was naturally crammed and chaotic, making naming highlights feel fraught with failure, so we’ll just say it was ruddy fun, lovably DIY, and we really hope this means it will be an annual thing – ‘cos fuck knows the city needs more of these kinda kicks. (We hear a campsite near Yuen Long could be on the cards for 2025…). – RG
Hong Kong metal evolves and rises
From hardcore and punk to black and death metal, the heavy subcultures are alive and well, flaking the plaster and rattling the pipes of dingy industrial spaces across the city whenever shows are organised. Protoss stole the show opening for South African “slamming deathcore” band Vulvodynia in September; the brutally loud local crew had the crowd worked into a lather from the first evilly downtuned chord and guttural growl.
ARKM (check their 2023 EP) returned with a nastier, blacker sound after recruiting new vocalist Nyx and hit the Philippines for a tour in March. Rather than the clean-harsh contrast of the band’s previous interaction, Nyx is all growl – an insane noise to hear coming out of a person of that size – and the band is better for it.
Finally, Snails blasted onto the scene this year – a who’s who of Hong Kong hardcore royalty, with members’ previous groups including Yau Dong, Dagger, Kyanos and King Lychee. Their show at The Underground’s Death Metal Dungeon showcase in September saw fur fly in a night headlined by Sky Burial (several members of which were in the excellent deathcore group Human Betrayer). – LJ
Even the disbelievers fell for Wellsaid
We got a little bit silly about Wellsaid in 2024. Karen, at least, has the excuse of a deep and nuanced appreciation complicated by personal relationships. So I’ll take the objective-ish stance – for whatever reason, after being underwhelmed by early gigs that carried a distinct stench of teenage emo, in the first half of the year I caught three Wellsaid shows in three months – supporting Teenage Riot, Chinese Football (pictured) and at Un.Tomorrow (see above) – each set somehow both tighter and rawer, more knotted with angst but steeped in abandon, than the one before. Then the excellent third album Regretopia dropped in September, realising all the band’s promise, and suggesting if primary songwriter Rocky had taken a breath earlier in the group’s decade-odd-long existence such heights were always in sight. – RG
The expat bands trundle merrily on
Thanks once more to our friends in Wellsaid, we have a new degenerator/demoniser for the absence of ambition, verve and youth that is the “fucking gweilo band” scene (cheers, Darryl!). It was hardly a banner year, with little to zero in the way of new releases to be excited about (namecheck: Pumpkin Bomb). The two insular, bar-based “festivals” have seen both greater audiences and talent in previous years, although there was a pleasant surprise in the anarchy of Macau punks Free Yoga Mats (pictured) smashing onto the stage at H2, while the one-off reunion of Brother Plainview’s original four-piece line-up at Auom was an actual fucking #moment. – RG
Hypefest was actually … good?
With little by way of traditional advertising (cough, probably not to our demographic) and free tickets given out like candy in the days leading up to it, Hypefest landed in all its corporate-branded, influencer-fuelled glory on the Central Harbourfront in November. The location is so often beleaguered by crap sound due to the windy, open seafront and (rumoured) jostling from the rich tenants of neighbouring towers to cap the decibels. But Justice were the juicy Sunday headliner that lured us into the Hypebeast-reading hordes. The sound was punchy and bassy while being crisp and clear (Clockenflap: take note). The massive wrap-around LED screens on the main stage were a sight to behold, adding dimension and drama to the performances.
Hometown heroes N.Y.P.D. kicked things off to near-endless mosh pits, comfortably at-home on large stages after their emotional Clockenflap stormer last year. Awich and D4vid levelled up the star power with sets packed with personality. The funky Frenchmen topped things off with a jaw-dropping light installation and 90 minutes of non-stop dance music euphoria paired with superb production value. – LJ
Scat did a show at a Christian space – and were ‘cancelled’ (?) two months later
“What is it that they’re singing?” my sweet friend H whispered to me during the now-notorious Leslie Cheung song by the young punk band as everyone moshed around us (I was on bag holding duty for a man who had hurled himself into the pit). Scat attracted a crowd I usually saw more at art openings than gigs – maybe because they played at Empty Gallery in 2022, or maybe these two scenes are moving closer together. But there was something so preposterous – so preposterous that it was actually kind of great – about performing against a shoddy makeshift holy cross, under incredibly low ceilings and with speakers so crap you stop hearing anything beyond the eighth row.
That show was, all in all, a riot, but it was probably the beginning of an end. Scat is a band of mixed signals: nobody, possibly not even themselves, knew if they were saying something straight or ironic for the sake of shock value or punk (what is punk? someone please explain it to me like I’m five). Even if they didn’t take themselves seriously, listeners had plenty of reason to be pissed off about the slurs in their lyrics and their fuck-everything demeanor, and two months later the band addressed their critics at a CUHK gig that somehow turned into a “forum”. I can’t tell you what happened or what was said because I fully dissociated for unrelated reasons, but soon they pulled out of the Blank Slate one-day hardcore festival in November, and it’s unclear what the status of the band is now. – KC
Clockenflap’s local well dries up, kind of
After the bumper bill of two events in 2023, some might’ve worried that the well of local talent was running low for Clockenflap 2024. Yes, and no – while the number of HK draws felt considerably slimmer, there were still some epic moments on hand. Not least Lucid Express, whose swirly shoegaze wonderfulness sent the Park Stage off on Saturday night with characteristically low-key aplomb (“Buy our merchandise. Or don’t. You’re poor. We’re poor. We get it”, pretty much ran front-person Kim’s sales pitch).
Biascut were also fun and frolicky, and I’m hoping some other contributor can write something meaningful about An ID Signal’s closing Sunday slot. – RG
Other notable moments
N.Y.P.D. released a 52-track AI concept album.
It’s worth adding: the Teenage Riot show described above was the release party for their excellent, remotely recorded third album, We Are Full.
The somewhat bizarrely cartoon-themed party room Simpson’s Space offered a new venue of sorts, complete with free-flow “beer flavoured” drinks, dubious liquor and an impenetrably complicated payment system for bands.
Tjoe Man Cheung made it to NPR’s Tiny Desk as part of Elmiene’s set.
The debacle surrounding Zenegeist and Chinese band Oh! Dirty Fingers, which was set to play in Hong Kong then cancelled amid backlash over abuse allegations surrounding their frontman.
Olivier Cong released his second album, Tropical Church, and I (Karen) profiled him for PostMag; it’s a record that demands slowness and attention.
“Guerilla” gig organiser Blank Slate put together a one-day hardcore/punk fest at a secret location that was so remote it was impossible to get to without a cab; the music was very loud and I felt very old.
Hermit-like punk-proggers Say Mosquito emerged from a lengthy hibernation to finally drop a second EP, Spun Out — the product of six years work, a typically bracing set that swerves through six knotty new tunes in just 15 minutes. Its existence requires the band’s online bio to be refreshed; AI is employed to simulate this writer’s voice to bring it up to date. Surreal.
Neoncity Records kept the funk alive and continued on its quiet global ascendancy with colourful vinyl releases of city pop’s foremost acts, including Mexico’s Macross 82-99. The translucent “Poolside” cassette player they dropped in time for summer didn’t escape our radar.
Jonathan Yang dropped a compilation album of unrelated sound art pieces conceived in recent years, Amalgamation, which I (Rob) am attempting to decipher for Zolima as we publish.
There were also engaging new releases from The Tears of Aether, Happy Friday, and rockabilly punks The Sideburns. Plus, finally, a debut single from the awesome (and awesomely tortoise-paced) Other Theories.
Doomy post-punk trio The Sinister Left returned with a couple of shows (and new drummer Phil Emond) after a hiatus of more than five years. Their 2016 album Soot had enough weirdness to pique our interest. They’re in the studio for the follow-up, so we’ll be waiting with intrigue.
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