“Music is a frightening thing,” Li Hongqi of Mr. Sea Turtle tells Apple Music. “When music connects directly to your soul, reason is powerless against it. I’m fortunate that from the start I knew this was what I wanted to do.” The vocalist and songwriter has been pursuing his musical vocation for 20 years, a milestone marked with the release of the indie band’s fifth LP, Running the Waves 20. It’s an anniversary album whose title vividly depicts how the inexorable march of time has motivated the band for two decades. Here, we see them continuing their adventurous stylistic evolution, marrying their garage and punk roots to genres from disco and soul to blues—but eschewing their trademark reggae and ska. “I don’t want to repeat myself,” Li says. Describing the inspiration for the Southeast Asian sound of “Kindle a Match”, initially released as a single for the band’s 18th anniversary in 2022, he remarks: “Back home, people my dad’s age play East Asian-style guitar. That whole area, including places like Vietnam, is historically the region of the Yue people, so that’s the sound and melody we share.” Founded in 2004 in Nanning, capital of the southern Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, Mr. Sea Turtle found their feet in Chengdu and subsequently set up camp in the cultural centre of Beijing. But the slower, warmer environment of the south called them back. Although the founding trio—Li, bassist Jiang Han and guitarist Huang Wei—are now based in Chengdu, their keyboardist Da Peng and drummer Hayato live further away, making face-to-face sessions more work to schedule. However, the band resist working remotely. “It’s got to be offline,” Li says. “We’re traditional. We work the way older bands like Beyond and The Beatles did.” Their old-school preferences extend to instrumentation too: “Serpent”, a slinky, synth-washed banger whose melody coils along the “snake charmer” scale, is driven by an insistent drumbeat that feels like an electronic loop, but which Li says was actually recorded live and shaped with studio effects. “I don’t feel safe just pressing play on an electronic track,” he says. “I get nervous when I can’t see a real person there.” Arriving three years after the band’s previous full-length album, 2021’s 死不回头 [Never Looking Back], Running the Waves 20 could easily have gestated for another two years, Li suggests, if not for the unexpected death of his father in February 2024. “Our relationship was pretty awful up until around 2010, when I was off on my own,” he says. “But after that he became a great friend, my best friend. We could talk for hours.” To cope with the shock, Li relied on his religious faith, alcohol and songwriting—and the album quickly took shape out of his mess of emotions. “For ‘The End’, I was sitting there drinking and wallowing in how awful I felt,” Li admits. “But then things I had long kept hidden came out in a rush—and in 10 minutes I had the whole thing done, words and music.” Completed in a similar burst of creativity was the stately rock lament “Before I depart and am no more”, although it used a melody written earlier. “I wrote the tune at a really low point,” Li says. “I’m usually a pretty happy person, so the melody had to wait for lyrics or a narrative. Then in February, the line ‘a lover’s clothing’ occurred to me, like how a loved one’s clothing can awaken memories of love and help you hold back the wreckage of reality. That line fit the tune.” Li’s creative process does not always follow this pattern, however. “It’s a rush,” Li says of the sort of inspired songwriting that can make him feel like a demiurge. “But it doesn’t happen all the time. Lots of songs are tough.” One case in point: The classic rock ballad “Magic and Knights” underwent repeated revisions but never felt finished until Li watched Martin Scorsese’s Life Lessons segment from New York Stories and heard Procol Harum’s “A Whiter Shade of Pale” on the soundtrack. The song’s Bach-inspired intro gave him the idea to add the classical riff that opens the song on acoustic guitar and appears as an organ interlude between the verses. Mr. Sea Turtle have always resisted labels and pay little attention to critics, a detached attitude the members sustained even during their appearance on the hit variety show The Big Band in 2019. So the pointed social satire of “woof woof”, delivered with a sarcastic soul strut, may come as a surprise. In the lyrics, Li takes aim at the braying voices that shout down online discourse—and the monster that dominates public opinion. “If that monster makes a statement, you’ve got to applaud,” Li says. “Online, people lose their sense of self. An individual has to become a warrior and expand the space for free expression.”