The New Sound of Asia’s Online Underground
Meet Yvnlazy, yeil, RYO, Grave, and cavyion, five artists connecting Japan, South Korea, Indonesia, China, and the Philippines through SoundCloud.
“Asia’s underground” makes several separate scenes sound like one.
The phrase covers artists who may never share a hometown, language, or even a genre. What they do share is an internet-first way of making music. Songs start on SoundCloud, travel through TikTok clips and YouTube videos, then turn up months later on an album with credits from three different countries.
Yvnlazy, yeil, RYO, Grave, and cavyion each occupy a different part of that network. Taken together, their catalogs show something more interesting than a regional genre: a scene held together by circulation.
Yvnlazy (Japan)
Japanese artist and producer Yvnlazy has been releasing music since the early 2020s. Drowning Nightmare, posted to SoundCloud in December 2021, became an early breakout, but the two albums that followed say more about how he works.
His 2025 debut album, Longing, and What Lies Beyond, is built around collaboration. J1rock produced and played guitar and piano on the title track. Other songs bring in defnottyrell, death, Vahipatsient, StoneSoWavy!, nxne, and cavyion. Yvnlazy remains the voice across the record while also handling much of its mixing and mastering.
That balance changed on Re:import, released April 29, 2026. The 15-track album is self-produced and includes Ouroboros, Fine Shyt, Mounjaro, and One Second. It is a tighter view of Yvnlazy without the long production roster behind the previous album.
Ouroboros had already reached a wider audience through the Japanese Underground Cypher 2026. Yvnlazy’s section pairs a stepteam beat with vocals that barely seem attached to it. The contrast is the entire appeal. Where a cypher usually rewards the hardest or most direct performance, his part almost floats away from the format.
yeil (South Korea)
South Korean artist yeil makes K-plugg, hyperpop, electronic music, and R&B. Those labels are useful up to a point. His catalog is easier to understand through the people around it.
His 2025 album ye included Japanese artist u_ni, South Korean producer ilypvc, and Asian-American producer sai. The follow-up, heart pop, makes the Japan connection even clearer. lilniina appears on 하나 둘 셋, while Markisa joins 러브스토리.. and swetty appears on the title track.
The album is only nine songs and runs just under 20 minutes. There is no room for long introductions or oversized arrangements. Most tracks land near the two-minute mark, which suits yeil’s writing: quick melodic ideas, bright electronic production, then out before the feeling gets overexplained.
His earlier tracks show the same preference for immediacy. 누구? uses a beat by Indonesian Discoplugg producer Zachz Winner, and oh, baby say my h, featuring swetty helped bring more attention to his work. By heart pop, the cross-border features no longer feel like side notes. They are part of the album’s identity.
RYO (Indonesia)
RYO is the stage name of Rini Agustina, a Jakarta-based musician signed to AntiNRML. She started making music in 2019 and first drew wider attention with Us. Her early catalog pulled from Korean and Japanese online scenes without tracing either one exactly. Emo rap, pop R&B, PluggnB, hyperpop, EDM, and dangdut-core all passed through her music.
SoundCloud preserves that experimental period. aBoUt u (qiio) has more than 27,000 plays, and listeners immediately picked up the koplo bounce beneath its discoplugg tag. 7pm with Josua Natanael takes a softer R&B route. lagu capek turns an exhausted bike ride and a passing train into a pop song. The genres change quickly, but the writing stays close to ordinary details.
Get Aurelia De La Roche’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
Her first EP, DANG! RYO, collected part of that earlier identity in 2024. The second, LoudeR, arrived through AntiNRML on August 15, 2025 and committed fully to JJCORE. Its six tracks include Cuma Temen, Jangan Buru-Buru (Berdua), main-main! with Josua Natanael, Gak Karuan, 1/10 with Tenxi, and Dalam-Dalam (Dalam Diam Pt. 2) with Limbx.
JJCORE fits RYO because it does not erase the styles she tried before it. The genre’s fast, overloaded dance production leaves room for the melodic instincts of her R&B songs, the digital edges of hyperpop, and rhythms that connect back to Indonesian club music. LoudeR sounds focused without pretending the earlier experiments never happened.
RYO had already built a résumé beyond streaming. At the 2023 Saints Awards, presented by Saint House, she received nominations for Artist of the Year and Holy Song of the Year. She then earned a place at Bandung’s Tau Tau Festival through its band submission and performed on the Panggung Pesta stage in May 2024. The lineup put her beside established Indonesian acts including Tulus, Dewa 19, Kunto Aji, Nadin Amizah, and The Adams.
Her song Heartless also appeared in episodes one and six of Open BO Season 2. That television placement and her festival set mark a shift from an artist circulating mainly through SoundCloud into one reaching a much larger Indonesian audience. Spotify has since placed her music on Viral 50 Indonesia, Viral 50 Malaysia, Lagi Viral, Hip-Hop Indo, Jiran Hits, and Naik Daun. At the time of writing, her Spotify page lists more than 1.3 million monthly listeners, while 1/10 has passed 23 million streams.
Collaboration remains a large part of the catalog. RYO has released music with Tenxi, Josua Natanael, SlushSoPretty, Limbx, Noya Clarissa, Zunekao, and 서준, among others. Those records connect her early online network to the AntiNRML era instead of dividing her career into a before and after.
RYO now has a recognizable lane, but she reached it by trying almost everything first.
Grave (China)
Chinese rapper Grave, also known as Zhang Yiyan (张艺严), took a different route. He began posting music to SoundCloud in October 2024, then used short snippets to build anticipation around jugg time and his debut album, Haka.
The clips did not explain much. They did not need to. Grave’s appeal is immediate: clipped flows, luxury-brand flexes, and lines switching between English and Chinese over production that leaves plenty of empty space around his voice. More than 300,000 combined views across Instagram and TikTok gave the songs an audience before the full album arrived.
Grave teased Haka in November 2025 with the official cover. The rollout continued for another two months. SoundCloud received the 19-track album on January 24, 2026, while the wider streaming release followed on February 5. The Spotify edition also added magic as an exclusive track.
A rollout that long can kill the energy around a new artist. Grave used the delay as part of the release. Each fragment made the album feel less like a sudden debut and more like a world listeners had already been watching form.
cavyion (Philippines)
cavyion is a Filipino artist and producer from Cavite whose music moves between PluggnB and electronic production. He started recording at home in 2020 and still handles much of the process himself, from production through mixing and mastering.
His role on this list is slightly different. cavyion is not only releasing his own music. He appears inside the credits that connect the other artists. On Yvnlazy’s I’m done gave y my all, cavyion produced the track while Yvnlazy and nxne handled the vocals. The song is Japanese, Filipino, and internet-based all at once, depending on which part of the process is being described.
That approach carries into cavyion’s debut album, Au Revoir, released July 17, 2026. The album keeps his voice and production at the center while bringing those online connections into the tracklist. Love Live! Sunshine!! with YungLex grew out of a connection dating back to 2020, when they were mutuals in the meme, internet, and anime-rap scene. His catalog is personal, yet the way it gets made is social.
This is what borderless music looks like in practice. It is less dramatic than the phrase suggests. Usually, it is one artist sending a melody, another opening the project file in a different time zone, and a finished song appearing online before either of them has entered the same room.
The connection matters more than the category
Together, these five artists show how loosely the label “Asia’s underground” fits.
Yvnlazy moves between collaborative albums and self-production. yeil links Korean electronic music with Japanese features. RYO crosses discoplugg, R&B, diary pop, and club music without losing the personal writing underneath. Grave turns fragments into a release strategy. cavyion works through the production credits connecting one catalog to another.
SoundCloud is the closest thing they have to a shared location. The scene exists each time a listener follows a feature, a producer credit, or a repost into another country’s corner of the internet.
