In-depth articles
Manila producer Jorge Wieneke built Club Matryoshka, a working nightclub inside a private Minecraft server, in 2019. Four years later the same instinct opened Apotheka, a real one in Poblacion.
Bangkok has a bar built for exactly this gap. Singapore has a law against it. A city-by-city look at what actually happens once Southeast Asia's clubs turn the lights on.
Five Southeast Asian labels doing distinct, verifiable work in 2026: Singapore's veteran Darker Than Wax, Jakarta's House Cartel, Bangkok's vinyl-first More Rice Records, Manila's cross-border Twelve Points, and Yogyakarta's gqom experimenters RAMPAK G.
A Ho Chi Minh City collective started out playing techno like everyone else. Then it decided the wedding-tent, TikTok-background music its parents' generation looks down on was exactly what its queer dancefloor needed.
In 2014, Dipha Barus got tired of Jakarta's EDM-dominated nights and started ripping SoundCloud edits for his own parties. This July, that party took over four floors of a Blok M building for Underblok Festival.
A sparkler-lit bottle lands on your table and everyone looks at you. Here's what actually gets tipped at clubs in Bangkok, Bali, Singapore, KL, Manila and Saigon, and what's already on the bill.
The bottle arrives on fire and the minimum spend is bigger than it looks. Here's what a VIP table actually costs in Singapore, Bangkok and Bali, and when it's worth it.
Victoria Yam builds PRIME ENERGY EP from retuned Malaysian and Filipino folk instruments, then co-founds ALIGN.ONLINE to archive Southeast Asia's femme and queer electronic scenes.
Jakarta closes its nightclubs by government order for the entire holy month. Bali, a Hindu-majority island in the same country, doesn't change a thing. Malaysia sits somewhere in between, depending entirely on which state you're standing in. Here's the actual rulebook.
On the Bukit peninsula, the party doesn't wait for dark. Here's how Bali's day-into-sunrise circuit actually works, club by club, with what it costs and how to get home.
A Mongolian techno pioneer who has played the Great Wall and ADE spent Saturday night behind the decks of a shophouse-sized bar on Haji Lane, the latest sign that Southeast Asia's smallest rooms are booking some of its most well-travelled names.
Forget the resort-strip EDM: Nha Trang's real scene is a single rooftop promoter, Phu Quoc's is a hilltop bar that's run since 2012, and the festival that put the island on the map hasn't confirmed a comeback.