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Forgive us for hammering on about Crazy Young Masters’ ‘Explosion’ series all the time, but, really, the bands brought to us from Beijing and Shanghai by the Crazy Young Masters are helping diversify – and electrify – our indie scene. We’ve just been visited by lovely folk songstress Wang Juan, and this year we’ve also seen Britpop (Super VC), dance-rock (Queen Sea Big Shark), and rockabilly (Banana Monkey). Next up – and it’s high time we had some – is punk.

Beijing four-piece Joyside call themselves the “bitches of rock’n’roll” who are addicted to Dead Boys, the New York Dolls, Sex Pistols, and The Stooges. Their singer, Bian-yuan, sounds appropriately drugged up and disaffected as he drags his sluggish vocals through swamps of thick guitar chords, and their attitude is pure punk – just take a look at their album titles: Everything Sucks, Drunk is Beautiful, and Bitches of Rock’n’Roll. Of late, their heavy sound has turned a tad more harmonious, which makes them accessible to all-comers.

Last year the band was the subject of an indie film called Wasted Orient, which tracked the beer-soaked boys across China as they held forth with their opinions about bleak modern Chinese society (via interviews in toilets and the like). A nice contrast to the faff we’ve been hearing about the Games-hosting country’s harmonious populace of late – and reason enough to check ‘em out, we reckon. John Lloyd