Welcome to the first chapter of the nocturnal otherworld, an episodic trend report exploring the culture, communities, and experiences that come alive at night.
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.
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?
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 Eugene Healey 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.”
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?
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.
This was such an interesting read. It made me come back to the question I've been contemplating some weeks ago if the current trend for wellness, intention, and calmness is a result of being exposed to too many impulses both online and in real time.
Great piece Alexi. I think one of the lesser acknowledged aspects of this topic is the sociopolitics of the Comedown. People have been feeling crap after a big party for decades, but when you are dealing with the multifaceted sense of semi-existential dread that hangs over life for so many today, that recovery period starts to look darker. Rotting in bed for a day with access to social media is no longer a day of self indulgent recovery, but a doomscroll of doubt and dread.
Gen Z seem to be much more driven by seeking a sense of certainty, and some of that might be down to a need for emotional regulation in very uncertain times.