China's cult alternative band P.K.14 returns with new album

After a half a decade of silence, a trailblazing band for China's alternative music scene, P.K.14, is making a comeback with a new album and it's deeply political.

The album, 1984, "is not a tribute to George Orwell, it's about our reality in China," said frontman Yang Haisong. "That's what we can deal with and where we can have an impact."

Their sound has become "more alive, more direct", he said, "very different" to their previous recordings. "We spent five years writing these songs," he said. The band picked the album's 11 songs out of 100 they worked on over these years. 

P.K.14 was inspired by post-punk rock of the likes of Bauhaus and The Cure in its early days in Nanjing in the late 1990s and has since played a major role in shaping yaogun - Chinese rock. Yang himself "has become something of a father figure to many bands," said Jon Campbell, author of Red Rock: The Long, Strange March of Chinese Rock & Roll.

"They are one of the country's last bands to come out of the pre-internet world that's still going," he said. For Yang, "he, like so many people his age in China, rock meant something that inspired and fueled his music and life journey."