What is “Underground” Nightlife in 2025?

Following Boiler Room’s return to Hong Kong, three nightlife organizers in the city reflect on the definitions and problems in naming “underground” culture.

Crowds were thick and heavy with sweat on Hong Kong’s harbourfront this weekend. Boiler Room, the world’s largest club music platform, returned to the city after six years, and thousands gathered for live performances by DJ Nobu, Yung Singh, tokyovitamin, and more. This marks the music broadcaster’s first large-scale event in the city—long overdue for the global music phenomenon.

Boiler Room’s work in “connecting club culture to the wider world” is valued at $87.2 million. But the now commercial giant was once a bootstrapped side hustle. When founder Blaise Bellville launched the brand in 2010, Boiler Room was simply a hybrid between an obscure alternative party series and a live music streaming show. Bellville hosted invite-only events in a dingy East London studio that only held 40 people at a time. Tapping local DJs to helm the decks, he’d tape a shaky web camera to the wall and stream their sets to the world in real time.

Then, MP3 blogs dominated the distribution of music on the internet, and Boiler Room’s pivot to video was revolutionary. It served the neglected market of underground clubbers with media representation they couldn’t find on radio or broadcast TV. But more importantly, Boiler Room was able to turn once obscure genres like Brazilian phonk, South African gqom, and Filipino budots into international phenomena. Communities and sounds that once were only rooted locally are now exposed to global audiences.

After only five years, Boiler Room was already hosting events internationally, covering cities like Tokyo, New York, Berlin, and Amsterdam. Seeing such growth, investors wanted a slice of the pie. Between 2015 to 2018, Boiler Room raised venture capital investment across three different rounds, according to Crunchbase, and in 2021, the ticketing platform DICE acquired Bellville’s company for an undisclosed price.

The mission to platform grassroots music for the world was a costly one. Boiler Room operated on a loss for several years. With investments to recoup, they needed to generate a profit — something that, in the attention economy, was directly tied to views.

Fans would begin noticing Boiler Room conducting more acts that guaranteed viewership, and thus profit: Fred Again in 2022, Skrillex in 2023, as well as Charli XCX and Rebecca Black in two seperate 2024 events.

“It’s becoming clear that it’s for views,” a host on the popular Road Podcast said in December 2024. In the same episode, another host added, “It’s exactly what a nightclub would do: Promote good music and good DJs,” but when the competition gets stiff and a profit needs to be generated, they promote safer acts.

In January 2025, DICE sold Boiler Room to Superstruct, the second largest music festival organizer in the world, and subsidiary of private equity firm KKR. Fans were not happy: “The soul is dead,” one wrote on Reddit following the announcement. “Now you just rent the banner and lighting from them.” On a separate thread, another commented, “The brand is simply [a] vehicle designed to sell a culture it’s fully incapable of representing.”

Boiler Room’s swallowing into KKR’s portfolio represents an all-too-familiar story of underground or grassroots brands aligning themselves with for-profit, corporate interests. VICE, for example, first launched a genuine revival of alternative gonzo journalism, to later publishing clickbait listicles on weed and sex to reliably generate views, and thus profit.

What is “underground” nightlife in 2025?

Although the definition of “underground” is rapidly shapeshifting, I decided to dissect its present meaning through its starting point: Hong Kong’s party organizers who steer grassroots initiatives, build communities around sound, and engage in the work that once gave Boiler Room its notoriety. In 2025, what does “underground culture” mean, anyway? Can it still be defined in the first place?

“I don’t like how people in Hong Kong pull the word ‘underground’ [and] use it as something to sell,” says organizer Ahura Mazda. For Mazda, “underground” is often invoked as a marketing tactic, to present for-profit events and venues as tapped into subculture.

Mazda is the co-founder of MOTH Agency, the “leading queer [and] femme DJ agency in Hong Kong,” as per their website. While outside of what is normative for Hong Kong, Mazda does not consider MOTH “underground.”

“Nobody in Hong Kong can claim that they’re underground, in my opinion. A true underground is when it’s literally against the system,” he says. “At the end of the day, what we’re doing is fully legal.”

Shanda Li echoes Mazda’s sentiments. “People just exploit the word ‘underground’ to make [their events] cool,” she says. “But the music, is it really underground? It’s closer to hype culture.”

But Li’s definition of underground culture is less strict. “I think to be ‘underground’ is to truly believe what you deliver, even though it might not be widely accepted by the masses,” she says. With her partner Angel Chan, Li co-founded Abyss 852, the first organization to introduce high-BPM techno in Hong Kong.

“The techno we do in Hong Kong is still very underground for Hong Kong or Asia,” Li says. You can still find many underground characteristics in her events: Using under-the-radar Telegram bookings, hosting warehouse parties, and platforming genres that have yet to reach the city’s mainstream.

“We rarely book artists just because they’re famous on Instagram. We book for the music,” she adds. “We don’t really focus on the hype. The techno we want to push is more about the journey and the texture.”

When the definition of “underground” is so tricky, Hugo Zhang, manager of Bamboo Bar in Hong Kong’s Lan Kwai Fong district, jokes that “We’re literally an underground bar… we’re located in B3 of our building.”

Common techniques in the world of underground culture are also adapting to the digital age: For Abyss, the “door policy” typically used to “vibe-check” partygoers now operates mainly on social media. With limited capacity at their private off-location events, Li references Instagram profiles and shares party details specifically with those who align with the culture Abyss is building.

Perhaps “underground” is better defined as what it isn’t rather than what it is: Zhang says that “underground” programming cannot appease “common tastes” and can’t think too much about if other people think it’s “cool” or “in,” because it should come naturally. “[Also] if, as a bar, your main purpose is making money, you cannot be underground,” he adds.

With all these aesthetic criteria to meet, and organizers with varying levels of profit incentives, Mazda says the “underground” is a spectrum. To determine where it lies on the underground/mainstream continuum, it’s important to ask three questions: “The first question to ask is who are the people running it? The second question is, are the people who are running it self-financing the events, or is the event paying for itself? The third question to ask would be, how much freedom are they giving [artists and organizers]?”

Mazda says that MOTH is “independent,” a label that he’s proud of and he believes matters much more than the term “underground.” The agency has no outside investors, and their parties and DJ equipment are fully self-funded. MOTH’s 26 volunteers don’t take home any profit from events. Independence, he says, allows for “more freedom of expression and development of subculture.”

Nonetheless, the idea of the “underground” will always be relevant. “There will always be a need for people to challenge society's ideas of what is acceptable,” Mazda says. “Maybe these clubs that are pretending to be underground could play an important role in spreading that message to a wider audience.”

I saw too many acquaintances at Boiler Room this weekend — too many for the event to even scratch the definition of “underground.” But “underground” is not the ultimate litmus test of a worthwhile event; it may be more important to identify the common denominators driving these communities.

Li says that “underground” is just one adjective to describe a party. For her, what matters more is the flow of sound and energy, and if parties are centered on “respect or love.” And as Yanto Browning suggests to ABC News, a growing demand for Boiler Room events and its alternative ethos might indicate a greater desire for community and intimacy, among artists and attendees alike.

“[Underground is] still very relevant,” Li adds. “But it wouldn’t mean it’s gonna be a good party.”