NOISEY 060: STREETS KILL STRANGE ANIMALS

Leng Mei formed Streets Kill Strange Animals in 2008, naming it for a nasty accident he witnessed in his youth. How’s this for a creepy interview excerpt: “many years ago I saw a dead animal’s body rolled over by a car. It was so smashed up that I couldn’t even tell what it was… At that moment I wrote down the words ‘Streets Kill Strange Animals’ in English.” The band runs with that cracked sense of helplessness and disorientation, juddering through noise-tinged art pop at its most dark.

Streets Kill Strange Animals blossomed at the Old What? Bar, an intimate venue near Beijing’s Forbidden City. This tiny punk bar is famous for incubating the burgeoning “No Beijing” movement of the mid-aughts, a faction of local bands that reinvigorated Chinese rock by drawing from the damaged art-pop of the 1980s New York underground. SKSA has been steadily rising, with opening slots for Beijing post-punk darlings Re-TROS, but they’re still plugging away at their day jobs. Leng Mei runs a second-hand music shop and bassist Yang Dan is still in college.