All the members are regulars at indie music bar Bound in Sham Shui Po, Kowloon. Chau co-runs the bar, which also sells Hong Kong indie music merchandise. “We were all talking about it and said, ‘Why not a full band’?” he says. “That’s how we went from a two-piece to a five-piece. It pretty much all happened at Bound.”
That same year, after playing several smaller gigs, NYPD had their first big performance at Clockenflap, Hong Kong’s landmark music festival.
When drummer Leo moved to Bangkok in 2021 he was replaced by Paul, who had produced the band’s eponymous studio debut in 2020. Founding members Jon and Chau say it was a “perfectly natural” decision, as Paul already “knew what’s up”.
In March 2023, they returned to Clockenflap as a six-piece, with both drummers on stage, amping up a high-energy mosh pit of mostly Cantonese speakers.
Although NYPD never ruled out the possibility of playing live with two drum sets, Jon says budgetary and logistical limitations make it a “really rare” occurrence. Paul replies, “But we did it three times, right?” and the members burst into a loud guffaw.
In 2023, the drummers did appear side by side for three performances – first in March at Clockenflap, then in April at the Megaport Festival in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, and in November, at a one-off show which, in an unprecedented move, converted the Lucky Dragon Restaurant in Shek Kip Mei, Kowloon, into a live music venue.
As NYPD’s Chinese name, “south sea party”, suggests, “fun” has always been at the forefront of the band’s identity, which now goes beyond musical production and performance. This year, the party of five (sometimes six) have been expanding their horizons to interdisciplinary creative ventures that bend the boundaries of sonic imagination.
On April 12, Easy Lighter was released on Subtrop Records, a label launched in late 2023 to serve as a platform for the band’s music and merch.
Based on “Easy Lighter”, a song that was written years ago but never recorded, the project features four remixes with musicians from Greater China, and took more than four months to put together.
Chau says the original tune has a “Zen vibe” that is ripe for being “messed around with” by the Taiwanese brother duo Mong Tong, the two bands having met through the Beijing-based experimental rock band Gong Gong Gong.
The other collaborator is the Hong Kong-based composer Olivier Cong, a friend of NYPD who has previously performed with the band as a session musician. “He’s a bro,” says Jon. “It’s always ‘why not’ with us when it comes to remixing and the people we love.”
The last track is a piano solo by the band’s own Jack. However, the track that holds the most sentimental value for NYPD is the remix with Berlin-based Taiwanese-Canadian indie electronic artist Alex Zhang Hungtai, known as Dirty Beaches from the mid-2000s to the mid-2010s.
Zhang was one of the band’s strongest influences when they started, so getting him to remix NYPD’s latest single, they say, feels like “a full-circle moment”.
Now streaming on digital platforms, Easy Lighter is also available offline via the band’s limited-edition, custom Buddha Machine: a pocket-sized musical loop player widely used in the Chinese Buddhist community for repeating chants.
One of its first appropriations in contemporary indie music came when Beijing-based experimental electronic music duo FM3 put out the first iteration of their Buddha Machine project in 2005.
As long-time fans of FM3, the band have always wanted to create their own version. “Easy Lighter” fits the bill, says Jon, because the lyrics are about smokers losing and borrowing lighters: “It’s like a Buddhist chant but the lyrics are the opposite. It’s always been like that for us – it’s a fun little contrast if people really read into the lyrics.”
Chau explains: “Every time we come up with a song, we always have a three-dimensional imagination on different aspects. Merch and visuals are some of the outlets through which we can express our creativity.”
From the Buddha Machine to the “Easy Lighter” music video released on May 6, all NYPD members say their main goal is to “have more fun”, and when Bangkok-based Leo – whom Chau jokingly dubs “a fan of the internet” – brought artificial-intelligence-generated tracks to the band’s attention, it was an instant hit.
“The AI tool was so fun, we couldn’t stop tinkering with it,” says Chau. “At first, I doubted whether it could work in a legitimate release, but the more I created, the more I understood it.”
Chau elaborates that after uploading existing NYPD tracks, demos and lyrics, both released and unreleased, the band instructed the tool to adapt the material to specific personalities and vibes.
“We examined the results to decide what vibe we would appoint as the songs’ names,” he says. “You still have to calculate to see what works better. We put a lot of our creative footprint into the project instead of just letting the AI run everything.”
Out of more than 100 AI-generated tracks, 52 were chosen for the coming album, G.A.I.G.A.I. “It’s almost like our own spin-off album which we remixed with technology,” says Jon. “It’s more of a conceptual project.”
Chau adds that remixes show “how one track can have many personalities”, while the AI project explores various genres including techno, garage, hip hop, punk and gospel.
In the first week of June, NYPD will release G.A.I.G.A.I on the usual online platforms, alongside a physical, limited-edition USB drop.
As for a more IRL sound, the band is working on a new album, to be released next year. As Chau says, it’s important to remember that, at the end of the day, “the idea is just a bunch of friends having fun together”.
