Them Bang Bros and Cloud Nyt Are Turning Iloilo City Into the Philippines' Next House Scene

Five friends in Iloilo City started DJing together in June 2022 and now hold down four nights a week at a bar called Drink SLS. They call themselves Them Bang Bros, and their sets jump from funk to baile funk to disco to house without apology. "We're not purists," the group told the nightlife outlet Midnight Rebels. "We'll play what works for the crowd without sacrificing quality."

That sentence is as close to a mission statement as Iloilo's house and techno scene has. The city, the provincial capital on Panay Island in the Western Visayas, sits well outside the Manila-Cebu-Davao axis that gets most of the attention in Philippine dance music coverage, and it doesn't have the headline-DJ bookings to show for it. What it has is a handful of people who kept showing up to the same rooms long enough to build something, and two crews in particular are the reason anyone outside the city knows that.

A Residency That Runs Thursday Through Sunday

Them Bang Bros is five people: Jason David, Ivan Jucaban, DIMAS, CJ Tanoy and Glock Villalobos. Ivan leans into funk and hip-hop, CJ works baile funk and house, and DIMAS handles the bass-heavy sets; everyone rotates across the weekend instead of splitting the room into solo bookings. The group's own description of itself, as relayed to Midnight Rebels, is blunt about the tradeoff that comes with playing a small city: you can chase purism or you can keep a room full, and they've chosen the second one every time since the residency started at Drink SLS, after an earlier run at the J7 Plaza Hotel.

The residency runs Thursday through Sunday, with members taking other gigs in between, Jason told Midnight Rebels. Filling four nights a week without repeating a set is the clearest evidence that the collective's "we'll play what works" line isn't just a slogan.

Cloud Nyt Built a Different Kind of Family, Then Paused It on Purpose

Across town, a second crew took a different route to the same problem. Cloud Nyt, founded by Loso, Lxnsta and Abudie, built a DJ-and-MC roster around mentorship as much as music: DJ Young came in already signed to Warner Music Philippines, Yuki brought R&B and sing-along hooks, and JustDrew, the newest and youngest recruit, learned the decks from older members rather than showing up with a ready-made sound. The collective's blend, world beats, underground hip-hop, R&B and EDM, was built around what they called a "middle ground" between accessibility and something more interesting than a top-40 playlist.

That one-year residency ended on the group's own terms rather than fading out. On February 24, 2024, the crew threw an event called The Finale at a venue named Level 7, inviting guest DJs from Manila's Midnight Rebels circle to send the residency off, and announced a one-to-two-month pause for what the founders called brand development. The stated plan was to come back "with a stronger brand and a more engaged community." What happened after that pause is something we could not verify anywhere in the sources available to us, a gap worth naming rather than papering over, since a scene this size runs on word of mouth and Instagram captions, not press releases, and the trail on Cloud Nyt's comeback goes cold there.

Part of a Pattern Bigger Than One City

Neither crew is operating in isolation, even if Iloilo itself gets little attention from the genre press. A February 2025 feature on the Philippines' DJ underground by Midnight Rebels placed Cloud Nyt and a second Iloilo outfit, UNKWN, alongside Pampanga's No Requests, Bacolod's Arsenal and Stellar Nights, and a cluster of Cebu, Cagayan de Oro and Davao collectives including Cradio Radio and Panda Fam, as evidence of a genuinely nationwide hyperlocal movement, DJs building scenes around their own cities instead of waiting for Manila's attention or an international booking to validate them. Moni-Moni's crate-digging did something similar for Cebu; Iloilo's version of that story has mostly stayed local, told by outlets like Midnight Rebels rather than the wider dance music press.

None of this makes Iloilo the Philippines' next Cebu or Davao overnight. A five-person collective playing a bar four nights a week and a crew that paused its own residency to rebuild it are modest, unglamorous building blocks. But they're the same building blocks every other scene on this list started with, and they're the reason a room above a bar on Panay Island has somewhere for a house record to actually get played on a Thursday night.

Cover photo: Them Bang Bros' CJ Tanoy performing, via Midnight Rebels.