I’d been out the night before; one of those unplanned, stupidly long nights that start with “just one drink” and end somewhere near sunrise. I woke up the next morning groggy, dehydrated, and absolutely furious with myself, because I had to be at a run rave before noon. A “sober morning wellness rave,” someone had called it, as if those words naturally belonged together. 

I pulled through anyway. By the time I arrived, I’d already embarrassed myself twice, and found myself sitting in a corner, rubbing my temples and nursing an aggressively bitter coffee. In front of me, a DJ was calmly spinning a tasteful techno-house set as if he was soundtracking a boutique spa. It was ten in the morning. No one was dancing. 

I live in Mumbai, a city where nightlife thrives despite the chaos stacked against it—curfews, traffic, venue politics, and an infamous municipal corporation. In the last two years, though, something has shifted. Branded ‘raves’ have started popping up in daylight, swapping vodka shots for cold brew, swapping sweat-drenched dance floors for minimalist cafés, swapping pill-popping chaos for probiotics and plant-based milks. At coffee raves from Chennai to Delhi, you’ll find a mixed crowd of Gen Z regulars, twenty-something founders, and a couple of gym-shredded wellness influencers, all politely swaying to afrobeat while sipping iced decoctions that cost more than the cab ride home. 

It’s not just India. In Los Angeles, the city that gave us the marijuana dispensary as a status symbol, there’s an actual ‘weed rave’, complete with THC coffee activations, rooftop yoga, and panel talks on cannabis legislation before anyone even hits the dancefloor. And somewhere in Portland, there’s an entire subculture orbiting the admittedly fascinating ‘Shrek rave’—a fever dream of lime-green body paint, gender-swapped Fionas, and All-Star remixes screamed at 1 AM by an audience who know every single lyric. 

But what makes all of this fascinating isn’t the novelty; it’s the tone. There’s a deliberate commitment to curation in these spaces; the pursuit of transcendence neatly repackaged for Instagram. It’s raving reimagined as a lifestyle alignment tool, where beats are secondary to identity signalling. Instead of ‘losing yourself,’ you’re more likely to find yourself strategising camera angles for the perfect sunrise Instagram reel. At one of Mumbai’s bigger coffee raves earlier this year, I watched a guy in pastel co-ords carefully rearrange his cortado three times to get the froth right before posting a clip captioned “high on life.” Nobody moved until he’d finished. 

Listen, as something of an intermediate raver—I’ve had all sorts of questionable trips into the underbelly of three-day festivals in the middle of nowhere, escapades with strangers, and a committed negligence of sobriety during all this—I think the crowd of folks who are “high on life” on Instagram are a vocal minority. Raves are still very much a safe space (at least ideally) for psychedelic exploration, wild uninhibited dancing, casually slutting it up, and all kinds of good-spirited debauchery. The spirit of ’90s Goa psytrance that your middle-aged, now-arthritic rave pioneers enjoyed isn’t dead. It has just travelled through multiple decades of cultural resets and reboots and now resembles something of a phylogenetic tree; splintering into dozens of weird, occasionally brilliant, occasionally embarrassing evolutions. 

And yet, there’s tension here. If you’ve spent enough time in the sweaty warehouses and half-legal parties that birthed modern rave culture, it’s hard not to feel disoriented by these daylight wellness variants. The older ethos was built on anonymity, risk, and sonic exploration. You didn’t know who’d be behind the decks until the first bassline dropped. The venue was someone’s cousin’s abandoned mill, and you prayed the cops wouldn’t find it. You lost shoes, phones, and sometimes entire weekends. That lack of structure—the chaos—is what made it special. Compare that to the branded, algorithmically optimised raves of today, where everything from the playlist to the decor is calibrated for virality. It’s not bad, exactly. It’s just… different. 

Part of the backlash, I think, comes from how these new formats borrow the language of raving without inheriting its spirit. A recent matcha rave plan in Gurgaon practically wrote itself: dozens of Gen Zers drinking iced matcha at 4 PM, a DJ spinning Bad Bunny, and everyone home in bed by 10. It’s a kind of low-stakes cultural appropriation—not of music or dress, but of the language itself. When you’ve crawled out of a tent at sunrise, covered in glitter, half-deaf from six hours of psy-bass, and still vibrating from your contraband of choice, that sounds less like a rave and more like an after-school workshop on party literacy. And yet, for the people there, it feels real. The sense of community is authentic, even if the triggers are different. 

I’ll admit there’s potential here too, and I mean that sincerely. The upside-down treatment of ‘raves’ opens up a real opportunity for curation—one that most organisers barely touch. If we’re hanging out at a so-called noodle rave, why aren’t we hearing Asian R&B deep cuts instead of recycled club playlists? A coffee rave deserves a smoky jazz set or even a swinging bossa nova soundtrack, not the same tech-house loop you’d hear at any Mumbai club on a Saturday night. You could pair art or history installations with playlists designed around cultural references or bring in crate-digging DJs who specialise in rare vinyl and forgotten genres. These formats could be playgrounds for unexpected sounds and textures, but too often, they settle for safe mediocrity. 

Ironically, the most interesting experiments right now are happening in spaces designed to resist the algorithm entirely. Across Europe, there’s a rising wave of no-phone raves; Amber’s in Manchester, Fold in London, and, of course, Berlin’s Berghain, where phones have been banned for years. These venues are deliberately stripping back the performative layer, forcing people into the kind of immersion that defined rave culture’s roots. DJs hate playing to seas of screens, while audiences (somewhat hypocritically) complain that phones kill energy. The best sets I’ve ever witnessed—those goosebump-inducing, time-erasing nights—had no documentation at all. They live only in memory, and maybe that’s why they endure and come to life as I share stories with fellow ravers, several years on.   

But here’s the thing: these ‘non-rave raves’ aren’t inherently wrong. They’re just working in a different social context, responding to a generation burned out by hustle culture, social anxiety, climate dread, and the collapsing myth of nightlife as liberation. Where earlier raves were about rupture—obliterating norms, crossing lines, tearing through the mundane—today’s versions are about safety and visibility. You leave with all your belongings, all your senses, and a 4K-ready highlight reel. For a lot of people, that’s the point. 

Which brings me back to the room at the run rave, watching the DJ spin house for thirty very sober, very thirst-trap-worthy attendees while I rubbed my temples in caffeine penance. The disconnect isn’t that these events exist. It’s that we insist on calling them raves, a word freighted with decades of history, rebellion, and psychedelic risk. That’s why so many old heads and scene veterans get defensive; they hear ‘rave and picture a heady blur of chaos, confusion, love, lust, rhythm, and passion. Not curated oat-milk chaos.