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This is hands down my greatest music discovery this month!

I discovered the Taiwanese indie rock band No Party For Cao Dong (草東沒有派對) through Project Kino’s YouTube essay, “Chinese Music - It’s Not Dead, It’s Misunderstood…”, which discusses how mainstream Chinese music tends to converge on ballads because the language’s tonal sounds must align with a song’s melodies to sound right.

Active since 2012, they released their debut studio LP, The Servile, in 2016 to great critical acclaim, winning several Taiwanese music industry awards.

The Servile sounds like a fusion of many of the rock subgenres I grew up loving as a teenager in the mid-to-late 2010s, but it interprets them with a fresh perspective to produce something that can stand on its own. If I had to label it, I i would describe it as the rougher, indie grunge sibling of Two Door Cinema Club’s or The Wombats’ early work, mainly taking inspiration from their guitar sound and melodic structures to create something with its own unique spin.

Favorite tracks:

• ’Grisly Me’ (Track 2): This track is reminiscent of Two Door Cinema Club’s What You Know but has a darker, smokier aura, perhaps evoking The xx’s infamous Intro (especially if listened alongside The Servile’s own track 1, ’Intro’)
• ‘Simon Says’ (Track 5): Described as “a powerful expression of anger and frustration among modern youth”¹, this song won the band Best Song of the Year at Taiwan’s 2017 Golden Melody Awards.
• ’Await’ (Track 7): This song is an absolute party. In this one, I sense influence from The Wombats the most.

In 2023 they released their second studio album, The Clod, which once again won the band three awards at the 2024 Golden Melody Awards². I’ll be saving that one for a future day.

Happy listening,

Max

No Party For Cao Dong - The Servile (2016) cover art