“At its best, a party is a place where intoxication and intellect are simultaneously welcomed, and where personal mythologies can take root and flourish into collective ones.”

- A. L. Bahta, Club Chess

At any given moment around midnight, amid the warm hum of chatter in a bar, two strangers will strike up a conversation, and soon a future collaboration is in the making. Somewhere else, a dancefloor is in a state of rapture, collectively entranced by a performance. On the other side of town, a party draws an unlikely ensemble of musicians, artists and weirdos. And as a constellation of disparate influences collide, a new creative scene takes root.

With the darkness of night dissolving our social armour, and interactions eased by inebriation, bars, pubs, clubs, and gig venues in any city play a crucial role in sparking ideas, brokering encounters, and allowing us to collectively revel in the arts. By day, we may have grown accustomed to passing each other like ships in the night. But as the sun sets, given the right infrastructure, a nocturnal, shared consciousness begins to form.

Musician Brian Eno once coined a word for these interpersonal dynamics, crucial for nurturing creativity: scenius. Combining ‘scene’ with ‘genius’, the term refers to the collective thinking that emerges when artists, visionaries, and thinkers live in close proximity, forming an interwoven community. Like a new joint brain, these clustered nodes interact in wild, unpredictable ways, sparking radical ideas and birthing the cutting edge of culture.

Scenius emerges, as writer Ian Leslie points out, in what becomes melting pots of passion, creativity and ego: “the stimulation of seeing what others are up to, the headspinning conversations, the clashes of different perspectives—creative, theoretical, commercial”. And nowhere are these sparks as fiery as at the places and gatherings of the night, where creative conversation, communal experimentation and altered states collide.

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The mycelial sprawls of after-midnight scenius can be traced throughout history across the underground network of clubs, bars and basements, giving birth to some of the most influential cultural scenes of modern history. From the cabarets of Weimar Berlin and the Ball scene in New York, to the emergence of house in Chicago and techno in Detroit, and the rise of grunge in Seattle, some of the world’s most significant cultural scenes were forged within tightly knit, vibrant nightlife cultures.

But what exactly is it about nightlife that makes it a potent facilitator of creative scenes? Observing a variety of cultural communities and movements across music, art and theatre, we identified 3 attributes that are particularly prevalent in after-midnight scenius: weak ties, collective effervescence and creative collision.

Weak ties

At local nighttime haunts, strangers turn into collaborators.

It’s 2013. We’re on Curtain Road in Shoreditch, London. Through a nondescript entrance and down a set of stairs, there’s a club called Plastic People. The venue, which shut its doors in 2015, is at first glance nothing special. A dingy, no-frills basement space with a pitch-black dancefloor. Yet today, the venue has taken on a near-mythical reputation. Partly because of its powerful audiophile sound system, which reportedly made revellers feel like they were dancing inside the speakers themselves. But more importantly, due to its influence in fostering some of the world’s defining electronic music scenes. From the party FWD>>’s part in incubating early dubstep, to the Co-Op night’s contribution to the broken beat sound, the events at the venue are credited with having an outsized impact on the electronic music zeitgeist.

In one recounted piece of lore that captures the venue’s tight-knit community of emerging creatives, musician Joseph Thornalley is hanging around at a regular party hosted by the label 1-800 Dinosaur. There, one night, the then-unknown producer encounters the artist James Blake. After a brief chat, Joseph hands him a USB drive containing songs he has made under the name Vegyn. Impressed by what he heard, Blake would later play these songs on BBC Radio in 2014, accelerating Vegyn into the spotlight.

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With its intimate creative network of locals that would return week after week to the venue and encouraged by its founder and resident DJ, Ade Fakile, Plastic embraced a no-holds-barred sense of eclecticism. It served as a hotspot for DJs, producers, and electronic music enthusiasts, connected through both artistry and friendship, to discover new, rare and diverse music and strike up conversations with other creatives pushing the envelope of their sound.

Like flows of electric current, certain nightlife spots around the world have a particular ability to expose us to new ideas and social connections, placing people with a shared creative passion in sustained, uninhibited proximity. Sociologist Mark Granovetter calls this the power of ‘weak ties’, arguing that our most valuable social connections are often not our closest mates and family, but rather the temporary friends we make in club queues, dancefloors and bathrooms, where spontaneous encounters between like-minded people lead to the exchange of ideas, numbers and, in Vegyn’s case, a USB.

Collective effervescence

Shared experiences that ripple far beyond the night itself.

It’s 1976. This time we’re in Manchester. The Sex Pistols, a then-obscure punk band on the rise, play to a small crowd at the Lesser Free Trade Hall. This is not just any gig. Every person in attendance will wake up the next morning viscerally inspired. Indeed, no single concert in British music history has seemingly had a higher ratio of attendees who would go on to become cultural vanguards. Among the roughly 40 people present at the show are future members of Joy Division, The Smiths’ Steven Morrissey, Mark E. Smith of The Fall, and Tony Wilson, founder of Factory Records. Many of them will mention that gig as a seminal moment that would forever shape their relationship to music.

What they experienced that night is what academics have come to call ‘collective effervescence’; a euphoric experience of a gig, performance or gathering that lasts far beyond the night itself. “Collective effervescence is an experience that we sometimes have when we’re in a crowd of people, when there’s a strong feeling of connection to others and a feeling of sacredness, that something special is happening,” explains psychology professor Shira Gabriel. And when a crowd is exposed to this communal high, the shared experience of the event ripples far beyond the night itself. Moments so charged that everyone present carries a piece of them forward, shaping the culture to come. It can happen at a live gig, at a club, or at a black box fringe theatre.

Sometimes, like at the Lesser Free Trade Hall, this communal rapture happens in intimate settings, generated by proximity and rawness. Sometimes it happens on an awe-inducing scale as well, as with Daft Punk’s performance at Coachella in 2006, a moment of collective effervescence experienced by the 40,000 or so people in attendance. The duo’s 11 pm slot at the Sahara Tent, where they performed inside their famous illuminated pyramid, is considered a tipping point in American EDM. As music critic Philip Sherburne notes, “the gig truly introduced Daft Punk to the rock kids…a lot of Americans, aside from ravers, hadn’t actually seen live electronic music before Coachella”. Electronic music producer Skrillex later cited the performance as an experience that fundamentally shaped his approach to music and visual production.

Creative collision

In the dim haze of nightlife, disciplines, influences and styles cross-pollinate.

It’s a Monday night in 1997 at The End, a club in London, and Trash, the party hosted by DJ Erol Alkan, is in full throttle. The club has become a gathering point for an unlikely coalition: techno heads, indie sleazers, and club rats, whose tastes would otherwise never intersect. Alkan’s playlist effortlessly moves from punk to pop to rock to disco, introducing a crossover sound that would eventually lead to some of the most prolific bands and emerging genres of the noughties. As NME’s Leonie Cooper later wrote, Trash was “the greatest indie crossover disco of all time.” The weekly party would provide early platforms for artists exploring the convergence of rock and electronic music, including Ladytron, Fischerspooner and Peaches.

Whether birthing hybrid sounds or novel combinations of aesthetics and styles, nightlife offers a space where scenes, subcultures, and ideas that would never meet in the daytime are forced into collision. Amid the haze and strobes of eclectic parties and genre-fluid nights, disciplines, influences and styles melt together to create something entirely new.

Nightlife establishments can act as a great leveller: a kind of third space where boundaries dissolve and artists from disparate mediums and across strata can gather, hang around, and mingle. Like the Mudd Club, integral to the NYC party scene in the 80s, where painters including Basquiat and Keith Haring spent time with Madonna and Klaus Nomi, leading to the New York no-wave scene. Or in the case of the Cedar Tavern in the East Village in the 50s, where painters like Pollock and de Kooning, musicians like John Cage, and writers including Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, convened to drink, share ideas, critique each other’s work, and occasionally brawl.

The state of midnight scenius in 2026

In many places around the world, IRL nightlife is in a perilous state. In the UK, 75% of nightclubs have shut since 2005. British pubs are closing at a rate of almost two per day. Industry surveys suggest nearly half of Berlin’s 150-plus venues have considered closing.

And when venues close, we’re not simply losing places to escape to for hedonistic revelry and fleeting entertainment. When clubs, bars, and live-gig venues are integral to a city’s social fabric, the loss of nightlife often also leads to a slow but certain demise of the local creative scenes. Whether it’s live music, club culture, theatre or the visual arts, these scenes depend on physical venues and gatherings as spaces for minds, bodies and creative expression to converge.

Yet, the picture isn’t entirely bleak. Across cultures and cities, a dynamic sense of nightlife scenius continues to pulse.

Weak ties are still nurtured, especially at timeless institutions that refuse to die, which continue to act as centres of gravity within scenes. Places like Cafe Oto, the jazz bar in East London, that has long provided a home for eccentric musicians operating outside the mainstream. The venue was famously mentioned in music composer Daniel Blumberg’s Oscars speech last year when he accepted Best Original Score for The Brutalist: he later explained that most of the musicians he worked with on the film’s score were people he had met through visiting the jazz venue.

Beyond the old guard, new places are also opening that have all the necessary attributes to become breeding grounds for new creative movements. Open Ground - a recently launched club in the unassuming town of Wuppertal in Germany - has become a pilgrimage site for nightlife enthusiasts and DJs from all over the world, thanks to its programming and impeccably tuned sound system. “These spaces are rare,” producer dBridge declared after recently playing at the venue: “it’s the kind of club that can birth new scenes”. Appleblim, another artist, compared the sound to that of the mythical London club Plastic People mentioned earlier in this piece, urging those who “like to be moved physically and emotionally by music” to make the trip.

Amid the surface-level spectacle of many venues and gatherings, we still witness flashes of true collective effervescence. Moments when artistry, ambience and passion lock into perfect sync. We want to draw particular attention to party and festival organisers who are committed to designing spaces that can unlock that sense of transcendental awe. Places like the coliseum-esque Loop stage at Dutch electronic music festival Dekmantel, a circular arena, bathed in lighting that at once spears into the heavens, and collapses back down onto the mass of dancers at its core. It’s the work of the artist duo Children of the Light, whose work was once described as “a phantasmagoria: an illusionary, shifting, dreamlike spectacle re-enchanting spaces.” As they explain: “Our goal is to make you feel part of something larger—a particle of light in a vast, boundless cosmos.”

And while many nightlife scenes continue to narrow their appeal to specific niches, there are still those who see physical gatherings as opportunities for creative collision. In Berlin, DJ Courtesy runs the Against Interpretation club night, which challenges mainstream, formulaic notions of club culture, featuring a hybrid format that combines music, theatre, and art, “an experience between a group show and a dance party, a night where musicians, DJs, and contemporary artists explore performance, music and sound.”

In her book The Lonely City, writer Olivia Laing observes the strange sensation of collective solitude that comes with living in a densely populated city: “you can be lonely anywhere, but there is a particular flavour to the loneliness that comes from living in a city, surrounded by millions of people.” This is what it’s like to live in a metropolis today: vast numbers of inhabitants in close physical proximity, filled with creative energy and passion, yet isolated, with fewer and fewer places to convene, share, collaborate, and experience the beauty of art together. Increasingly, social networks are expected to replace these real-life encounters. We expect inspiration, conversation, and community to emerge from social content feeds, live streams, and Discord servers. And when the internet begins to replace the collective encounter of a night out, nightlife loses its once-de facto role in society as the engine of culture, and creative scenes are often reduced to hollowed-out versions of their former selves.

Championing midnight scenius means re-embracing the idea of a city at night as a vital, interconnected organism. As the architecture think-tank AMO argues in their Club AMO report, cities are the most ancient social network that have stood the test of time: “the art, fashion, and the city’s magical ability to connect us at the right time, night or day. Hundreds of different places to hang out, be inspired, meet up, or split up.” We need this physical social network as a place where spontaneous, unlikely encounters happen, where scenes can effortlessly collide, and where we can collectively experience creativity in all its forms and feel viscerally inspired.

This is the second chapter of The Nocturnal Otherworld, an episodic trend report exploring the culture, communities, and experiences that come alive at night. You can view the first chapter here, where we explore partying in the age of constant optimisation. Thanks to Jack Arnhold for supporting the research for this piece.

Across mythologies, the otherworld symbolises a supernatural realm distinct from everyday human reality. A place of perpetual youth, abundance, and pleasure, where time flows differently.

I’ve always felt that the collective gatherings and physical spaces that come alive at night - from the bustling ‘third spaces’ of bars and pubs to dark, dingy clubs and illegal raves - offer something similarly ethereal. A uniquely intimate and liminal reality beyond the well-lit sensibility and structured productivity of daytime.

The nocturnal otherworld is an episodic trend report that offers a deeply human, imaginative, and cross-disciplinary look at how after-hours culture fosters a special sense of connection, identity, escape, and excitement.

The findings in this series of essays have been informed by on-the-ground ethnography, social listening, and various interviews with nightlife insiders, from industry advocates and DJs, to clubkids and urban planners, connecting hundreds of dots across the diverse facets and perspectives that represent the nightlife experience.

When former 24/7 cities are today frequently devoid of activity after midnight, and younger generations are championing a new relationship to partying and socialising, the questions we ultimately want to answer are: what do people lose when they lose their nightlife? And what do they stand to gain by keeping the nocturnal otherworld alive?

Expert collaborators:

• Lutz Leichsenring; Berlin Club Commission, global nightlife advocate

• Andy Crysell; author, Selling the Night

• Mike Evans; ex head of marketing at Dekmantel, Vienna nightlife advocate

• Harumi Arrascue; urban planner; nighttime culture; Sydney District Council

Research and editorial support by Jack Arnhold

In Human Traffic, a noughties cult classic film that follows five friends through a debauched weekend in the UK, the impulsive, hedonistic weekend warrior Jip captures the giddy anticipation before a night out:

“I’ve got 48 hours off from the world, man! I’m going to blow steam out of my head like a screaming kettle, I’m gonna lose the plot on the dancefloor. Anything could happen tonight, you know? This could be the best night of my life!”

It’s a scene that evocatively captures the role that a night out has played for many generations. A chance to let loose, to blow off steam, escape the daily grind. As the sun sets, the world of bars, clubs, and afters opens up, offering a temporary reprieve from office cubicles, Zoom meetings, traffic jams and domestic obligations. From Friday through to Sunday, exciting uncertainty replaces monotonous predictability. Anything could truly happen. These could be the best nights of your life. A place to lose track of time, to lose yourself entirely, to chase your instinctual urges until the sun reluctantly rises again.

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However, in an era defined by economic precarity, the dominance of hustle culture, and an increasing obsession with wellness, this once-inherent desire for reckless abandon is fading. Young people who might once have craved escape and release from routine now prioritise ‘locking in’ and reasserting control. When the cultural narrative celebrates optimisation of time and body, the impulse to let loose and lose the plot feels counterproductive, wasteful and irresponsible.

As a result, a new kind of party paradigm is emerging, one that seeks to solve our collective need for social, offline interactions, without the frenzied alcohol-centred hedonism of late-night partying.

From the rise of matcha and coffeeshop raves to dance parties at gyms, saunas, bakeries and beigel shops, these daytime-oriented, wellness-focused events offer what their organisers call “conscious partying”. Spaces and gatherings that facilitate music, movement and socialising in a way that attempts to coexist with the equal desire for control and balance, a way to party that also intersects with a desire for wellness, sleep, health and mindfulness.

Soft clubbing promises to make partying calmer, intentional, and balanced. But shouldn’t a night out offer a respite from these very sensibilites?

Speaking to nightlife participants who have attended sober daytime raves, there are clear benefits to the soft clubbing trend. For many, these gentler forms of partying offer an opportunity to find genuine connection and release in a way that feels more casual, inclusive and sustainable. A party experience without hangovers and regrets.

However, despite these virtues, a niggling dissatisfaction persists. When partying is so governed by restraint and balance, designed to slot neatly into lifestyles of productivity and intention, is something lost?

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Beyond the matcha rave enthusiasts, there’s a growing faction of sceptics, who view this emerging trend as antithetical to the OG partying ethos. As Rory Bradshaw, a pro-partying wellbeing influencer, exclaims in a TikTok protesting against the confluence of raves and daytime sensibility:

“They say partying is one of the most unproductive things you can do, but you won’t see me at a coffee shop rave anytime soon. Partying matters. Dance out our emotions, feel safe being exactly who we are.”

This sentiment is at the core of the anti-soft club movement. Coffeeshop and matcha raves offer an opportunity to connect with others and have some fun in a casual, accessible space. But to truly achieve emotional transcendence and a sense of escape from the shackles of everyday life, one must embrace the frenzied chaos of sweaty clubs and the intensity of late-night raves. Only then can we truly let our guard down, unravel our tidy daytime identities and achieve a total loss of oneself to something larger.

Music artist FKA Twigs coined a term for this exact feeling with the title of her 2025 album Eusexua, which she describes as the feeling of pure bliss and the sensation of losing oneself, and losing track of time; an experience she recounted feeling at the early hours of the morning in a rave in Prague:

“That feeling of when you’ve been out all night and you lose 7 hours to music, and you look at your phone and you think, ‘Oh, my gosh, it’s 8:00 in the morning.”

Amid a time in society plagued by loneliness and a constant pressure to maintain productivity, a feral night out, staying out until it’s suddenly 8 in the morning, enveloped by the thumping bass of a dancefloor, becomes a radical act of resistance. Pushing through to the break of dawn, encircled by the raspy chatter of the afters, transforms into a gesture of defiance.

Can this experience of dissolving into the mass, into the music itself, be achieved within the confines of a daytime sober rave?

A 2021 study in the journal Frontiers in Psychology exploring the cathartic power of dance-focused events, found that 4 ‘D’s were required for partying to unlock a sense of awe and personal transformation. Dance and Drums were prerequisites, but two other ingredients were equally vital: sleep Deprivation and Drugs. The research validates what the soft clubbing detractors intuitively knew all along: daytime coffee raves might minimise sleep disruption and help you to feel virtuous on Sunday morning, but those very disruptions, the deprivation, the altered states, are vital steps to the metamorphosis.

For advocates of soft clubbing, sober daytime parties are heralded as an opportunity to have fun, listen to music and connect with others without the physical repercussions and late-night excess of a traditional night out. However, for some, soft clubbing is not only dismissed as a subpar partying experience, but accused of being something even worse: a commodified betrayal of our leisure time. Derided as a version of nightlife that has buckled under the relentless pressure of capitalism, conformed by the need for constant productivity, where a hangover is seen as a waste of valuable time. Mocked as an act of performative status signalling, where losing oneself to something larger is irrelevant. As cultural commentator argues:

“I try not be too judgemental of people having fun, but I do detect something quite sinister here. Club culture is at its best is subversive, its anti-efficiency, it’s where misfits gather in liminal spaces to embrace freedom, abandon and embrace the possibility of becoming both wholly oneself or someone else. Soft clubbing feels like the exact opposite, it’s a sun drenched performance of self-optimisation.”

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Observing the abundance of sober daytime rave content on social media, the dancefloor indeed appears to almost always feel like a performance designed for social media flexing, filled with a sea of phones capturing the DJ and filming each other dancing, with cups of bright green Matcha in the air.

Speaking to nightlife participants about their first-hand accounts, they too describe a highly performative atmosphere. As Viktoria, a research participant with experience attending sober daytime parties in Dubai, explained to us: “they wanted to share that they’re part of that cultural movement. Because there is sort of an aura around cool people gathering there, a lot of biohackers, a lot of ‘cool’ entrepreneurs”. Another research participant, Cris, describes a similar experience at a bakery party in Paris, DJ’d by Peggy Gou: “They were there for the happening, not really for the culture. They were defo there to be seen and record the moment for the clout.”

Can ‘softer’ forms of partying exist beyond the trap of optimisation and productivity?

In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche famously argued that culture, art and the human experience are shaped by two opposing forces. On one side, there’s the Apollonian desire: representing reason, control, the individual, the search for structure. On the other end of the spectrum, the Dionysian force, representing chaos, excess, collectivism and returning to a carnal state.

Soft clubbing, often rooted in the sensible logic of Apollonian reasoning, rejects the Dionysian desire for chaos, excess and impulse. But what if the future of partying could find a way to balance these two forces? Merging intensity with intention? Acting with impulse, but also reason? Pursuing our instinctual desires, while staying in control?

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Mike Evans, ex-head of marketing at the electronic music festival Dekmantel and a nightlife advocate in Vienna, who we spoke with for the research, paints a picture of an emerging partying landscape that explores that very intersection. A new wave of organisers, promoters and crowds navigating a new frontier where emotional transformation and a sense of unbridled escapism can be achieved without relying on the alcohol and stimulant-fuelled late-night excess of ‘traditional’ partying.

One of the examples mentioned by Evans is the DJ and producer Eris Drew’s Mystery of the Motherbeat parties, which position clubbing as a “space of healing”, a place designed around psychedelic introspection and sonic conjuring rather than total hedonistic obliteration.

Viktoria mentions ecstatic dance as another expression of a more mindful and intentional clubbing experience: a freeform movement practice in which participants dance without a prescribed structure, guided only by the music and their own bodies, free from alcohol, phones, and conversation. As she explains: “It’s about expressing yourself in the freest way possible, you can do whatever you want, you can move into whatever way you want, and it’s a safe space. Everyone is on their own journey.”

Elsewhere, this tension between transcendence and softness finds form in the rise of ambient clubs, such as Kwia in Berlin, described as a place of “quiet intensity, emotional openness, and deep listening”, un/becoming in San Francisco, and Tender Place in Melbourne; something in between living rooms and listening bars that offer a more gentle form of escape and transcendence from the everyday.

The shape of partying to come: soft, and intimate, yet still offering cathartic release

On one hand, we see emerging generations becoming less willing to engage in the excesses of a traditional night out and its consequences. On the other hand, sober daytime raves risk leaning too heavily into wellness culture, turning into a performative fad, stripping themselves of the intensity and transcendence that partying has always promised. So the question becomes: what comes next?

Based on our research, the future lies somewhere in the middle. Not a coffee shop rave, with dancers waving baguettes and matchas in the air. Not a 48-hour techno club marathon. But events and gatherings that enable us to escape the daily grind, fully let go, and achieve real communion, without the destructive repercussions of excess, chaos and impulse.