"I'm glad our new songs, which carry both sarcasm and empathy, resonate with young people entering the workforce, which is a world that's very different from the one we first stepped into," he says.

The members of the current lineup were once classmates at the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts. In retrospect, their coming together seems almost inevitable. In the early 2000s, that relatively small campus hosted four or five rock bands from different departments simultaneously.

"Art students were already a pretty unconventional group," Miao recalls."And the ones who insisted on playing rock music inside an art academy felt even more out of place."

In 2007, after being built up through the collective efforts of the founding team, Dead Flowers went on hiatus and gradually disappeared from view. What followed was a decade spent drifting between Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen, also of Guangdong province; a decade of workplace struggles; a decade of marriages, children, and being reshaped by ordinary life.

The turning point came in 2017, when they received an invitation to perform at a rock festival. Zhao and Miao, the band's founders, decided it was time to reunite. In May that year, the band officially reassembled.

This time, however, they did not return simply as a band. They reimagined themselves as "Dead Flowers Punk Unlimited Company", a structure that, half in jest and half in earnest, treats the group as a cultural project rather than just a music act. In recent years, this has led them into the tattoo and designer toy sectors, as well as art exhibitions.

After nearly two decades apart, as they put it, as "undercover agents" in the workplace, their live shows now carry a peculiar mixture of rawness and humor. They feel less like carefully packaged concerts than open-ended, semi-improvised declarations: unpredictable, restless, and charged with the unresolved tensions of contemporary working life.

Even during the years the band was inactive, the friendship never ended, Zhao says.

"We went to parks together, went to each other's weddings. I even hosted Wei Lu's wedding as the emcee. We once rented a whole guesthouse by the sea just to re-create our college weekends. We went to karaoke, pretending to play instruments like an air band. We didn't really talk about music much. KTV was our musical exchange."

Now, as the band prepares a new album scheduled for release this year, it plans to dig even deeper into the themes of contemporary life: work, identity and survival. Their performances, described as "immersive" and "ritualistic", aim to push beyond the conventions of rock shows.

At some concerts, audience members are asked to sign "temporary work contracts" and even wear bald caps, stepping directly into the band's world, constructed on the stage.

"We want our shows to be more than concerts," Zhao says. "They're a chance to step into a shared situation to create a collective emotional space that only exists right there and then."

Contact the writer at chennan@chinadaily.com.cn