From Y2K to indie sleaze: how hyperspecific, themed club nights took over New York

Priced out of concerts and still craving the rush of a night out, Gen Z have turned to parties fueled by a different kind of nostalgia.

  All photography by Cady Siregar

It’s Friday night at Bushwick’s Market Hotel and The Chainsmokers and Halsey’s 2017 hit “Closer” has just set off the club. Around me, an 18+ crowd dressed in graphic crop tops, fishnets, heavy eyeliner, and chunky jewelry have packed the dancefloor so tightly a moshpit threatens to break out. A cloud of digital cameras hover above the crowd, their flashes matching the club’s strobe lighting. When “You’re Not the One” comes on, a girl nearby shouts, “I LOVE SKY FIORI!”, presumably referencing the love child of Guy Fieri and Sky Ferreira.

I am at a “Who’s afraid of 2014?” Tumblr party, an event throwing it back to the glory days of 2010s internet nostalgia and the music that soundtracked it: Lorde, The 1975, Crystal Castles. Tonight’s event is just one of many themed club nights that have popped up all over New York City where nostalgia is the drug and the theme. In addition to Market Hotel’s 2014 Tumblr party, the venue also hosts a Y2K party, a Eurodance party, an indie sleaze party titled “Sleaze Market,” and a Bad Bunny-themed rave on Easter weekend. These parties are consistently popular, and usually aimed at the hyper-online, Internet-raised Gen-Z cohort who have been able to access decades’ worth of music through Spotify, YouTube, TikTok, and are nostalgic for a music community from yesteryear. With concert ticket prices more expensive than ever, the promise of attending an affordable club night that plays the music you love, has cheap tickets and drinks, and guaranteed entry, has become an appealing option for many chasing the adrenaline rush of a good night out.

I, however, attend the 2014 Tumblr party at Market Hotel out of both curiosity and a quiet sort of horrific fascination. As someone who spent the majority of their teenage years on Tumblr running an Arctic Monkeys fan blog, seeing my youth diluted into an event flyer on Instagram almost sent me into an existential crisis. I recently turned 30. What do you mean that the Internet I grew up with has now turned into a theme for a nostalgia party?

In N.Y.C., these club nights are usually hosted at DIY venues as either full-night shebangs or late-night fillers following a band or live performance. Tickets usually do not exceed the $25-$30 price point, and the themes aren’t always rooted in nostalgia. When Charli xcx’s Brat dropped last summer, venues like Market Hotel and Warsaw were quick to put on their own Charli-themed club raves. It’s an easy way for venues to capitalize on trending pop music, sure, but it’s also a chance for Charli fans to congregate and bask in the lime-green glow and dance with friends without spending $100 for a concert ticket (the going price of a nosebleed seat at Charli xcx’s Brat 2025 summer tour).

“It’s a safe, good option,” Thomas Dunkley, founder and owner of the N.Y.C.-based booking agency GBH Events, says of the themed club nights. “You’re gonna hear the music you like in a club that you probably know. You’re gonna have a good time with your friends. The drink prices aren’t gonna be crazy. The ticket prices aren’t gonna be crazy. Everyone’s gonna get in.”

GBH Events hosts dance parties themed around everyone from Chappell Roan and Lady Gaga to Tame Impala and Prince at DROM in the East Village. But it’s the nostalgic, subculture-specific events that make up their bread and butter like pop-punk and emo nights at Brooklyn Monarch and David Bowie “Let’s Dance!” ’80s parties at TV Eye in Ridgewood, Queens. More events in their roster include indie nights, vapor wave/future funk parties, 2000s hip-hop nights, French house and disco parties, and nu-metal raves.

“The popularity for the concept is increasing, but I also think the competition is increasing as well,” Dunkley says. “You have to try and stay ahead of the game a little bit, come up with new ideas, new angles.”

For Dunkley, these club nights are low-cost, popular, and effective, since bookers for these types of events don’t have to pay huge amounts of money for an artist. All it requires is a concept, advertising on social media, DJs, and a venue that’s easy to work with. “It’s a lean business model,” he says. “There’s not too much to worry about.”

The phenomenon of nostalgia overlapping with nightlife is nothing new. Each generation for the last 60 years has discovered ways to connect with other like-minded people in their community as a reaction against mainstream culture, from the 1970s loft jazz scene in New York, DIY punk shows and house parties, to underground warehouse raves in abandoned city districts. With the help of the Internet and digital streaming platforms, it’s now easier than ever for young people to learn about niche subcultures.

David Grazian, a Professor of Sociology and Communication at The University of Pennsylvania sees the rise of Spotify, YouTube, and TikTok as integral to giving young people (and older) the ability to access, revisit, and latch on to an older cultural phenomenon. “Part of it is a kind of nostalgia,” he says. “And there’s a certain kind of status, and distinction that comes from rediscovering something that is cool but forgotten.”

That sentiment is fully present at the 2014 Tumblr party where the majority of attendees are not old enough to have been active on the website during its prime — and perhaps that is the point.

“I just love this kind of music,” Ashley Frank, 22, tells me, in a plaid mini skirt and choker. “I never got to see The Strokes when they were just starting out and now I feel like I can.” When I ask how she found out about the bands that soundtracked this particular era of the Internet, she replies: “TikTok.” Another partygoer, Katie Murphy, 21, decked in a lacy black top and skinny jeans, tells me she “doesn’t really listen to pop stuff or the charts,” and prefers, instead, LCD Soundsystem and The 1975. “Edgy music.”

At least for the partygoers at the Tumblr party, it seems this themed club night is a way for them to experience an IRL iteration of the digital age that happened before their time. But what sets this decade of young clubgoers apart from those in the past 50 or 60 years — those who came of age in the ’90s looking to disco and funk; those who were born in the ’80s yearning for blues and jazz clubs — is that their nostalgia loop has gotten vastly accelerated by internet culture. “Indie sleaze,” a subculture born on Tumblr synonymous with the term “hipster” — fedora hats, American Apparel, and danceable guitar music — was only coined in 2021 to describe an era of the Internet that ended in 2014. Now it’s a dress code on a flyer.

Emo Nite is one of the original, and longest-running themed club nights today, and recently celebrated its 10th anniversary. What started at an East Los Angeles dive bar in December 2014 by founders and organizers Morgan Freed and T.J. Petracca as a way to dance to the emo and pop-punk music they loved with their friends has blossomed into a multi-city, “touring” party across the United States where members of blink-182 and Dashboard Confessional sometimes take turns behind the decks. A decade on, Emo Nite takes place in multiple cities every week, from dance parties in N.Y.C and L.A. and Philly to cities that aren’t usually in the typical mainstream pop tour road map in Kansas and Ohio.

“I started this party when I was 24 and now I’m 35, and the people that come to Emo Nite are still 24,” Petracca says, remarking on the party series’ continued relevance to a younger audience. “It’s cool that we’ve been able to continue this for a literal decade and bring it to a new generation. I think affordability is definitely important, and consistency. It’s building an institution, keeping people coming back.”

Adds Freed, “We have an opportunity to give a sense of relief and escape for six hours a month in all these cities. How do we do our best job of doing that?”

I think club nights like this Tumblr party are doing the same when I leave after an hour and a half — because this party is not for me. Being on Tumblr and running an Arctic Monkeys blog saved me: it allowed me to meet new friends who shared the same music taste as me which helped me feel so much less alone. I’m halfway out the door just as the club throbs with the opening bars of The 1975’s “Robbers,” which obviously invites a mass singalong. Hopefully these club nights are doing the same for them.