2026 might be the year of the Chinamaxxer, but my favorite period for vicarious China-themed nostalgia will always be the mid-2000s. From what I’ve heard, China in the aughts was buzzing with pre-Olympics energy, alive with the excitement of a people whose bright future had moved close enough for them to reach out and take it. Musically, this led to an explosion of underground creativity. This was the time of Snapline and Carsick Cars and the rest of the No Beijing avant-gardists; of P.K.14 and Re-TROS and Nanjing’s unexpected ascent as the crucible of Chinese post-punk; of SUBS and SMZB and the ongoing debate of whether China’s punk capital sits in Beijing or Wuhan.1 When I actually moved to China in 2014, just before the Xi regime became particularly repressive, there was already a sense that I was catching the tail end of a golden age.

But Jake Newby arrived smack in the middle of it. The veteran journalist didn’t know about any of this when, in the early 2000s, he went to a university career fair in Britain and ended up with a one-way ticket to teach English in Shanghai. But the plane he took touched down in 2005, landing him in one of China’s most vibrant cities in one of the most vibrant periods of the country’s contemporary musical history. Over the next two decades, Jake would build a career covering that scene for multiple publications, becoming one of the most recognized English voices on China’s underground music scene in the process. He’s still at it today with his newsletter Concrete Avalanche, providing a gateway for readers outside China to encounter and contextualize a world that has only grown more active since he started writing about it.

“I was very fortunate with the circumstances and the timing in a lot of ways,” Newby tells me over a video call. Sporting a wool beanie and a longish but well-kept beard, Newby’s presence in the conversation is thoughtful and calm. He peppers our discussion with insightfully humble statements like the one leading this paragraph, a real-time display of the quality I’ve come to associate most with good journalists, particularly those covering music scenes they came to from the outside: a willingness to put their ego aside and center the lens on the people they’re writing about. In addition to his love of good tunes, Newby’s desire to bring his subject’s lives into focus has been the guiding force in his career. “It was very much just a collision of my interest in music and my interest in telling people’s stories,” he says.

Hailing from a village in Wiltshire, Newby had always been a music fan. As a child, he would dig through his parent’s record collection and record songs off the radio to make mixes. University provided an opportunity for him to start going to more shows, as well as to hone his skills as an essayist via a writing-heavy degree in politics and sociology. However, Newby’s journey into music writing was, like his journey to China, largely unplanned. “After my first year in Shanghai, I’d sort of fallen in love with the city,” he tells me. “So I went to East China University, took an intensive Chinese language learning course. I was still teaching a little bit on the side, but I also started to pick up a little bit of writing and editing work for various English-language magazines.”

At the same time, Newby was going to more shows. At one early Re-TROS show, where Newby was one of the few foreigners in the audience, a young woman approached him to find out how he’d learned about the venue. In one of those lucky turns that Newby alluded to, that woman turned out to be scene insider Sophia Wang, who started introducing Newby to more bands. This accelerated Newby’s entry into a music scene that he quickly recognized was egregiously undercovered. “I was excited and interested in the scene, but also like, ‘why is there not more information about these kind of acts?’” Newby says. “So I really fell into wanting to speak to them, wanting to find out their stories, but also wanting to try and bring those stories to a broader audience as well.”

Not finding this type of coverage anywhere else, Newby started writing his own, contributing to blogs like the Shanghaiist and Kungfuology, the latter of which he co-wrote with Andy Best. The sweat equity that Newby put into this early writing work ultimately laid the foundation for his long-term career. In 2009, the English-language magazine Time Out, a city guide featuring recommendations for bars, restaurants, and events in places across the world, launched a new publication in Shanghai. Knowing that Newby was well-connected to that scene from his blogging, Time Out’s editor Toby Skinner tapped Newby to head the new publication’s music and nightlife section.

City magazines like Time Out have played an underappreciated role in recording burgeoning music scenes in places like China. Although they’re not usually considered part of the music media landscape, they do have something the more traditional music press has been lacking for some time: staff reporters who are deeply embedded in the places they’re covering. Since Time Out’s raison d’etre is to recommend events and activities that people in the city can enjoy, their writers necessarily have to be present to experience those events themselves. Directly exposed to the energy permeating these scenes, these writers can find and recognize local gems that will never cross the inbox of music writers in New York.

Skinner was especially focused on including local acts. While Newby had the chance to cover several high-profile international artists when they came through Shanghai (Kanye West and Justin Bieber are both in his interview history), he was also given ample space to write Chinese bands that would go on to become scene leaders. Skinner was also a supportive editor, providing Newby with advice on writing about music gigs that stuck with him throughout his career. “He once told me, the thing that you tell someone when they say, “how was it?”—the first thing that you say back to them should be how you open your article,” Newby recalls. “That’s the aspect that really spoke to you.”

Newby’s move to the nightlife beat was another case of fortuitous timing, putting him in the writer’s seat just as clubs like Shelter and Dada—as well as labels like Shanshui and SVBKVLT—were turning the city into a hub for experimental club music in China. Newby would stay at Time Out Shanghai for almost a decade, eventually becoming Editor At Large. He’d move from there to be the Managing Editor of the Chinese youth-focused publication Radii, then spend several years freelancing for the likes of The Wire, Vogue, and The Financial Times. His stretch as a full-time resident in China ended in 2022 when he moved back to the UK, but he still returns at least once a year and continues to cover the scene from afar via Concrete Avalanche.

Throughout, Newby has been conscious of the possible pitfalls of covering a scene he’s not native to. “In a lot of ways I wish Chinese bands were covered and treated like bands from anywhere else in the world,” he says. English-language coverage, he notes, has a habit of presenting music coming from China as a statement on the country’s political landscape, a lens that isn’t always applied in the same way to bands from Manchester or Brooklyn. Newby has tried to counter this in his own writing by focusing on Chinese musicians’ personal background and circumstances, working to tell their stories rather than superimposing his own.

Fortunately, English-language coverage has also improved over the course of Newby’s career. He calls out Bandcamp Daily and The Wire—as well as journalists like Josh Feola—as being particularly good at covering China’s music scene in a way that “treats artists as artists,”. He also points to a growing network of Substacks that are developing thoughtful coverage of Chinese music and entertainment, including Michael Hong (Mandogap) and Emily Liu (Active Faults). Will Griffith still captures much of the on-the-ground energy at Live China Music. And while Newby acknowledges that life as a music journalist isn’t easy, he still sees space for more writers with perseverance and the ability to find their niche. “I still believe there’s audiences out there for a lot of stories that people want to tell,” he says.2

Even within the relatively narrow focus on China’s musical underground, there’s plenty more to cover. As fun as it is to wax rhapsodic about China’s halcyon mid-2000s, it was ultimately a scene very much centered on Beijing. “Now, it’s really kind of diversified,” says Newby, noting that many cities outside of Beijing and Shanghai have developed their own self-contained musical ecosystems. China’s alt-rock scene in general has also been turbocharged by high-profile shows like The Big Band; Re-TROS, the band that Newby saw with a couple hundred other Shanghai fans when he first moved to China, now perform to tens of thousands.

In other words, nostalgia is a sucker’s game. That pre-Olympics energy never dissipated—it was amplified and refracted, seeding a constellation of microscenes as it cascaded across the country. There’s plenty still happening and plenty more to discover, and certainly no shortage of stories to tell. Newby himself is looking ahead, meeting the future with his signature mix of curiosity and humility. “I am just very excited about what’s going on in terms of alternative music,” he says. “I’m not sure Concrete Avalanche does more than scrape the surface.”

For more of Jake’s writing, check out his profile of Chinese Football for NME or his feature on Wuhan post-rockers Hualun for The Wire. And of course, if you haven’t already, give his newsletter Concrete Avalanche a follow.

The Album

Grupo Celeste, …El Fabuloso!” (Peru): Spiky, brightly-colored rhythms twisting past vocals that carry a trans-lingual sense of longing.

The Reports

1. Felipe Maia explores the future of baile funk for Dazed, speaking with seven scene insiders about what’s next for a genre that, despite its global success, is facing a new wave of repression within Brazil itself.

2. Martine Douglas is our expert guide through the Pacific Northwest’s winding underground rap scene in this Bandcamp Daily feature.

3. Also in Bandcamp Daily, Michal Wieczorek pens a history of Peruvian chicha, charting the genre’s course from Amazonian cumbia to the cultural juggernaut it is today (with some obligatory struggles against government hostility along the way).

4. Tom Lea and Chal Ravens dedicated an entire podcast episode to Baltimore’s club music scene which, in the grand scheme of America’s urban dance music, certainly hasn’t gotten much attention. In classic No Tags style, the actual interviews begin after an entertaining half-hour intro.

5. Is Lisbon’s club scene undercovered? Doesn’t matter - April Clare Welsh’s in-depth report on her resident city for DJ Mag breaks new ground, describing the economic and political forces that are making the scene increasingly inaccessible for already marginalized communities.

6. Mixmag contributor Jun Kim comes out with a longform piece on how more and more Korean DJs are getting their start through university clubs called dongari, creating a new path onto the DJ circuit that’s somewhat unique to South Korea.

7. Daniel Dylan Wray takes on another history for the Guardian, this one diving into the forgotten legacy of Black soundsystem culture in Wales.

8. I’ll admit I have not spent much time thinking about the role of the accordion in the music of Southwest Louisiana, but Devon Leger’s fascinating Bandcamp piece on the Cajun and Creole artists that built this tradition has convinced me to pay attention.

9. Rolling Stone Magazine’s MENA branch published a couple of interesting end-February pieces I’ll sneak in here, one on the producers building Egypt’s hip hop scene (Engy Hashem) and another in conversation with a few artists representing North Africa’s “new wave” (Dounia El Barhdadi). Slightly more recently, OkayAfrica’s Amuna Wagner ponders if Bad Bunny’s ability to achieve worldwide fame without shying away from political topics could be a blueprint for North African artists as well.

The Playlist

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The Album

Kohra, akhõ (India)

Some of the most satisfying paths for discovering new music are also the most circuitous. This album rec came, in a roundabout way, from the the Travel & Leisure article. That piece named exactly zero artists, but it turns out the author is also a musician who built a career blending the harp with electronic music. It’s surprisingly hard to find her music online (even on her own website), but she does have a link to a collaboration with the Indian DJ and producer Kohra, who featured her on the opening track to his pandemic-era album akhõ.

I listened to that intro and ended up playing through the entire album, which led me down a different internet hole. Kohra, I learned, is Madhav Shorey, the founder of Qilla Records, a label nd deep house collective also based in India. His stage name means “fog” in Urdu, and akhõ is named after a Gujarati mystic poet from the seventeenth century. Both namesakes fit the record’s patient forays into introspective, mist-shrouded house, which Shorey tints with just enough acid to warp the edges. It’s not an album that rushes you through, which is also fitting. The best things are often those that take the longest to find.

The Reports

1. Sham Hanieh spoke with six Palestinian electronic musicians for DJ Mag, discussing their struggle to keep up their practice amidst the destruction of their homeland as well as their push-back against the victim narrative so often applied to artists from Gaza and the West Bank.

2. Jake Newby dedicated his most recent newsletter to China’s emo scene, which is so hot right now that people are starting to throw the word “revival” around.

3. There’s been some chatter recently about DC and SF being monocultures, which is a false but understandable impression given the outsized influence that politics and tech have on each city’s respective vibes. In Bandcamp Daily, Henry Ivy set the record straight for the Capitol, diving deep into the Washington, DC dance music scene that clearly hasn’t been getting sufficient attention. (Bandcamp has previously provided similar counterpoints for the Bay Area here and here)

4. In one of two blockbuster histories published this month, Madison Moore writes about the shrinking number of queer Black clubs for Resident Advisor, citing a litany of damaging forces from racism to gentrification to the toxic masculinity embedded in 90s-era hip hop. (fun fact - the article extensively quotes the DC-based DJ Juana, who was also featured in the above-mentioned Bandcamp Daily piece).

5. In the second history, Tracy Kawalik gives Chicago footwork the classic Mixmag longform treatment, penning what must be the definitive history of how it moved from the American Midwest to dancefloors across the globe.

6. Nick Eustis is collaborating with the Substack Is It Propaganda? on 3-part series digging into the history of rock music in the Soviet Union. Leading off with lines like “smuggling contraband philosophy in three-chord progressions,” the whole series is sure to be a banger.

7. Christian music is getting an update, with artists like Big Freedia and even Kendrick Lamar showing that music can address religious themes without sounding preachy. This month, the Lebanese news outlet Naharnet looked further afield to explore how styles like trap and Afrobeats are being embraced by Christian artists to push the genre (?) forward.

8. I was on the fence about whether to include this piece in Travel & Leisure about electronic music venues across Asia, since it doesn’t actually reference any artists. But ultimately, the spaces where ravers gather is as important to the culture as the music they listen to, and Nirupama Belliappa’s article is so clearly written from a place of respect and experience that it balances out its somewhat touristy slant.

In other news, I recently published a piece for Bandcamp Daily about the record label Perpetual Doom, a quirky alt-country outfit weaponizing irony from my hometown of New Hope, PA. Not a scene report but definitely under-covered.

The Playlist

Paid subscribers have access to a custom playlist featuring one song from each of the articles above.

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The Album:

ZOUJ, Sabah Al Kheir Men زووج (Mixtape)

Somewhat of an unconventional album pick this week, since it is 1) not an album, and 2) not necessarily the work of a single artist, as each track has a different vocalist. The unifying figure is ZOUJ, aka Adam Abdelkader Lenox, a Germany-based producer with roots in Morocco, France, and the U.S. The songs on his Sabah Al Keir Men mixtape are the product of collaborations across the Middle East and Europe, including several artists that popped up in past articles featured here (e.g. Rita L’Oujdia, Elias). His songs showed up again this week in OkayAfrica’s coverage of Way-Way, a hyperpop-leaning take on traditional Algerian music that, like ZOUJ, I’m hoping to see more of in the future.

The Reports:

1. Jamal Khader, a prolific expert on country music across the world, is in Bandcamp Daily discussing how Zambian artists were adapting American roots music to local traditions long before Zamrock arrived on the scene.

2. Alex Deller at The Guardian uses several recent reissues of 80s-era Japanese punk as an opportunity to look back at hardcore’s history in one of the most conformist societies in the world.

3. Richard Villegas has taken on yet another dedicated column on trends in Latin music, this time for Mezcla. His first piece looks at the growing tendency for Hispanic artists to mix folk music styles and other hometown influences into their albums, with Bad Bunny’s now Grammy-winning DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS held up as one of the most visible examples of this shift.

4. Meanwhile, Oscar Adame Galeano is in Dazed discussing the traditionally-oriented and oft-sensored corridos tumbados, using ten tracks to plot the Mexican genre’s rise to global success in a walk-through that’s grounded in both academic theory and an intimate knowledge of the Mexican experience.

5. Alte may be mainstream now, may Nelson C.J. argues in OkayAfrica that the (somewhat loosely-defined) Nigerian underground is still providing the country’s music scene with fresh ideas.

6. Nelson C.J. in OkayAfrica again, this time with Tšeliso Monaheng in a different type of article in which the two writers look at the local African genres they expect will make an impact in 2026 (hint: there are probably more than you think).

7. Amelia Dhuga of Condé Nast Traveler walks us through the history of jazz in Lebanon and how the scene has continued to sustain itself through decades of war and conflict. (paywall)

8. Anyone who primarily associates Brazil with bossa nova or baile funk might be missing the bigger picture. Mac Margolis reveals in National Geographic that the country-adjacent sertanejo style has become the nation’s biggest genre in a ranch-to-radio cross-over that many in the U.S. may find familiar.

The Playlist:

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Scroll below for the full article list, and for paying subscribers, scroll to the very bottom for a custom playlist with one song pulled from each article.

The Album:

ADG7, Such Is Life (South Korea):

Before Black Country, New Road was showing hipsters that klezmer could be cool, a different 6+ person band was updating traditional music styles for a modern audience. That band was ADG7, a self-proclaimed “shamanic funk” group whose stellar 2020 sophomore album Such is Life approaches North Korean folk with a pop-shaped flair that will keep you on your toes and on your feet.

The Reports:

1. Mainstream K-pop tends to emphasize the “pop” more than the “K,” but Hwang Dong-Hee’s piece in The Korea Harold highlights a collection of bands that are adapting traditional Korean music styles into new, experimental pop structures.

2. Speaking of K-pop, Choi Min-Ji shares in Korea JoongAng Daily how that particular mega-genre captures so much of Korea’s listenership that indie acts are now focusing on international markets, where music fans have a more omnivorous stylistic palette.

3. Shiba Melissa Mazaza is back in Mixmag with part two of her three-part series on 3-Step, this time exploring how the African house genre is uniting musicians across the continent.

4. In Hyperallergic, Carolina A. Miranda writes about the Chilean label Hueso Records and, by extension, the punk and indie artists who subverted the right-wing dictatorships that controlled large swaths of Latin America in the 80s.

5. El País sent Carlos S. Maldonado to explore the musical dynasties of the La Independencia neighborhood, aka Mexico’s “Little Colombia” aka the birthplace of cumbia rebejada. And for those with an El País subscription and Spanish language skills (or Google Translate), Andrés Ortiz also wrote up a deep dive on the music of Colombia’s Pacific coast.

6. In ABC Asia, Karthiga Rajendran shines a spotlight on the rather pop-oriented Tamil indie scene, which has been given a helpful boost by the Chennai-based soundtrack-focused label Think Music.

7. Jacques Denis is in Pan African Music with a fervent, somewhat head-spinning report on the contemporary Congolese music scene. I wrote a similar piece for Bandcamp a while back and am psyched to see more coverage of this exciting corner of the music world making its way into English-language media.

8. Anna Cafolla contributes an exceptionally well-developed report on Ireland’s fast-rising indie scene to The Guardian’s music coverage, diving into race, welfare policy, and the generational trauma left over from The Troubles.

The Playlist:

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As always, scroll down to find an album highlight, a round-up of scene reports from this month, and (for paid subscribers) a custom playlist with one song pulled from each scene report.

The Album:

Francisca Valenzuela, Buen Soldado (Chile): Light but sharp-hooked piano-driven pop from Chilean indie’s Cambrian days.

The Reports:

1. In 2024, mass protests in Kenya ended with 60 people dead, most at the hands of the state. In his monthly Music In Africa column, Rolling Stone’s Mankapr Conteh writes about how this tragedy catalyzed a new wave of protest rap across the East African country.

2. In the first installment of Mixmag’s three-part series on contemporary evolutions in African house music, Shiba Melissa Mazaza pens a blockbuster of an essay on the history and cultural tension behind the 3-Step sub-genre that’s become a dominant force on club floors across the continent.

3. Henry Cooper also contributed a piece to Mixmag on Cambodia’s hard-won success at building an electronic music scene after the country’s cultural communities were hollowed out by the Khmer Rouge.

4. I’m somewhat late to this, but it seems that Richard Villegas has a new column in the Southwest Review about music scenes across Latin America, told with his signature mix of regional context, personal storytelling, and rapid-fire hyperlinks. Looks like he’s published four so far, with the latest diving into Chilé’s fabled indie pop scene.

5. Defending his unofficial title as one of the most prolific music writers around, Richard Villegas also wrote a piece for Bandcamp exploring the influence of shoegaze, post-punk, and other melancholic sounds in sunny Central America.

6. Another Bandcamp regular, James Gui, looks at Japans’ minyo revival and asks whether the resurgence of Japanese folk music is really as recent a phenomenon as people think.

7. Karla Gachet and Ivan Kashinsky put together a stunning photo series for NPR on the various manifestations of cumbia across the Spanish-speaking world, with separate dispatches from Mexico, Peru, Colombia, Argentina, and Ecuador, and even Los Angeles. Bonus points if you can find the customer playlist they tease in their header article (I haven’t been able to track it down).

8. Grammy.com tapped Stephanie Mendez for a well-sourced piece on heavy metal’s history in Latin America and that genre’s co-development with the region’s very real struggles against government oppression and military takeovers.

9. In the latest example of compilation coverage turning into a mini scene report, Katie Bain is in Billboard wrote about the diasporic Iranian musical community in 80s-era Los Angeles, which was recently resurfaced by the folks at Discotchari in their compilation album Tehrangeles Vice. (If you want to go even deeper, Bandcamp also wrote about the compilation in one of their Album of the Day features).

The Playlist:

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Album Spotlight:

Wampi, El Rey de la Habana (Cuba): Reparto royalty delivers for Latin music fans who like reggaeton but love variety.

Scene Report Report:

This section features a round-up of articles on regional music scenes from the last month (give or take a week), as well as a curated playlist with one song from each of those scenes. The playlist is now a paid add-on for those interested in getting straight into the music. Songs are arranged in the same order as the articles, so it’s easy to go from a song you like to the corresponding scene that the artist came from.

If that convenience sounds worthwhile, you’re welcome to subscribe. Substack literally won’t let me charge less than $5/month, but it does allow me to set a pretty large discount on the annual plan, so the monthly rate is quite a bit lower if you’re willing to pay for the year. For paid subscribers, your playlist is available at the bottom of the page.

1. Following up on last month’s MENA-heavy coverage, Esquire weighed in on how that area’s pop scene is poised to take over the world.

2. What the Hindustan Times calls an Indian “indie” scene seems like it could be better described as non-Bollywood pop music, but whatever you want to call it, Christalle Fernandes claims it’s currently thriving.

3. Meanwhile in Mali, the outlook is less rosy. Rachel Chason reports for the Washington Post on how the country’s globally fêted music scene is struggling to survive since Islamic militants took power in 2020.

4. New York contains multitudes, and Vrinda Jagota reports for Bandcamp on how the city is now home to a flourishing community of South Asian musicians that are reinventing Sufic music in the Big Apple.

5. Bandcamp again, this time with April Clare Welsh covering the anti-colonial roots of funaná in Cape Verde, appropriately timed for the 50th anniversary of the African archipelago’s independence from Portugal.

6. It’s Hispanic Appreciation Month, and Rolling Stone is celebrating with a new series of features on Latin music, including ground-level reporting by Ana González Vilá on Cuba’s homegrown reparto genre that’s making waves within and beyond the island.

7. Andrew Rodríguez also mentions reparto in his AP article on Cuba’s music scene, going into detail on how a new class of young musicians are starting to revitalize the island after many of the older generations’ artists were lost to emigration.

8. DJ Mag is back with some stellar reporting, with Martin Guttridge-Hewitt writing about Armenia’s club scene through the story of the Cyber Folk, a local DJ school that’s democratizing electronic music production and churning out some great artists in the process.

9. Turns out Spotify has a newsroom, and it recently looked into the well-traveled crossover points between Latin America and West Africa’s respective pop scenes. The article is a bit light on original reporting and editorial oversight, but it does benefit from access to Spotify’s substantial user streaming datasets. Whether reggaeton and Afrobeats “blended seamlessly” or “seamlessly blend,” it’s clear from the data that the connection between the two scenes is strong.

BONUS: Not a scene report, but I recently had the chance to cover an impressive debut by a the Irish krautrock band pôt-pot for Bandcamp’s Album Of The Day feature. Give it a read if that’s your thing.

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1. I’ve decided to combine the album feature and the Scene Report Report into a single …

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