Rock band puts 'work' into entertainment

Lead vocalist Zhao Wei explained in a recent interview with China Daily that the band's most significant change over the past 20 years has been a shift from pure self-expression to something closer to social reflection.

"Hormones and youthful energy drove our early music," Zhao says."Now it's more like a long-running' workplace survival diary'. We've seen the transition from traditional office culture to an always-online, platform-based working life, which has become our new source material."

Each member, he adds, has spent years as both employees and as their own bosses, giving them a firsthand understanding of the anxieties, compromises, and quiet frustrations that shape today's working lives, especially those of younger people just entering the workplace.

On July 2, the band premiered the song Work, I'm in Love with You, turning the muted grievances of office life into fully voiced slogans.

It's just a job. Do I really have to show up?

Three days without sleep, and still no overtime pay.

These phrases, familiar to anyone who has ever scrolled through late-night group chats or muttered to themselves on the commute home, are lifted out of private exhaustion and recast as collective chants.

For the audience, the effect is immediate and personal. "It feels like someone finally wrote a song using the exact sentences from our office group chat," comments a fan on social media. "You're laughing, but you also realize you're laughing at your own life."

"You come out of their shows feeling strangely relieved," says another fan. "It's like everyone has been complaining together for two hours; somehow, that makes it easier to go back to work the next day."

This mixture of humor, critique, and lived experience has become the band's defining feature. The band is not only making music, Zhao says, but is building a shared emotional space, a kind of communal release that reflects both the comedy and the cruelty of everyday working life.

That sensibility is also visible in their stage image. The band members wear black suits, black ties, and white shirts, topped with bald wigs, forming a deliberately comic tableau that turns the anxiety of hair loss from overwork into visual satire. The effect is both absurd and uncomfortably familiar.

"Most rock bands try to look cool," says bassist Miao Chengbin, who is also the founder of the multi-brand boutiques BadMarket and BadVillage, which have 10 branches across the country. "We want to do the opposite, to make ourselves look ridiculous. If it makes people laugh, that's exactly the point."

Looking back, Miao feels the band's trajectory has come "full circle".