Outlet Drift Return Home

The first thing you notice are all the churches. Big, imposing ones, with spires rising into the skyline near train stations; small ones nestled within residential rows of houses. The county of Taitung, on the southeast coast of Taiwan, where we had travelled to visit the indie rock trio Outlet Drift, was splattered with churches in a way that it wasn’t splattered with anything else. 

As we got off the bus and started walking down the hill towards the water, we passed another church, emerging out of a driveway, the only source of sound and activity on a Sunday afternoon in December. We were on the way to meet the band at a café run by a friend of theirs. We arrived there a few minutes early, and sat out the back on a large balcony, looking past the port and into the Pacific Ocean.

We had ordered a couple of coffees and were beginning to get comfortable with the breeze on our faces and the panoramic view in our sights when we’re told the band was here. They came out to the verandah to greet us with big smiles, looking relaxed, but bundled up in thick jumpers and hoodies. While we set up in the inside room, at a large table with a low couch on one side and mismatched chairs on the other, we noticed the whole area had been closed off just for us, to keep the interview recording as quiet as possible. It was just one of the many kind, thoughtful gestures we’d encounter that day, from everyone related to the band.

In fact, that relaxed, welcoming vibe was in contrast to the image the band give out in their promotional material, with stern, intense looks and deliberate poses. The trio - guitarist Usan, his sister (and bassist) Putad, and their cousin, drummer Lin Ken - are often laid near the water, or on sharp rocks by the Taitung coast, forming an imposing triad. 

Both the intensity and the closeness of their poses is also evident in their music, a psychedelic blend of jam-based rock, funky rhythms, and chanted melodies influenced by the group’s indigenous Amis background. The Amis are the predominant Aboriginal group in this part of Taitung, and the band has come to embrace their identity in their approach to life and to music, after years of rejecting it for a life in the city.

When they were young, they moved to Kaohsiung, the largest city in the south of Taiwan, a common move for young indigenous people from counties like Hualien and Taitung. They formed the band in 2010 and emerged from a very different indie scene, one rooted in small live venues in big urban centres like Taipei, Taichung and Kaohsiung. Looking at footage and photos of their early years, they seemed a product of the era—the band wore jeans and Sonic Youth t-shirts, sung mostly in Mandarin, and promoted shows with dance party themes at vaunted venues like Underworld and The Wall.

Their musical sound at the time of their expansive 2015 debut record, Drowning 逆游, already contained many of the ingredients of their current sound. There’s the deep rhythmic groove and playful interplay between all three members. The slinky single-note riffs and the muscular drum beats. The long moody spaces and the insistent vocal harmonies. Many of the songs were rearrangements of tunes that guitarist Usan had written in his free time away from military service, and were hinting at their future blend of rock and tradition. 

But it was still an unformed, punky sound, derivative in parts, and full of youthful anger and confusion. Songs had names like Shit of God, Brain Tumor, and Teeth in a Plastic Bag, and the lyrics were a dizzying mishmash of fragmented personal experience, childlike refrains and discomforting Amis folk imagery. Tracks like Still Lying and Can’t You Buy Yourself burst with garage emo energy, descending into shouted refrains and noisy outros.

The band’s unique musical voice and their members’ personal identity were still being defined at the time, as they faced the challenges of alienation and disconnection from their Amis culture. 

The Amis are the largest of the sixteen nationally recognised Aboriginal groups native to Taiwan. They number over 200,000 and, along with the Paiwan and the Puyuma, are based in the southeast of the island. During Japanese colonial rule in the first half of the 20th century, indigenous groups across the land were subjugated and their cultures suppressed. This was only exacerbated through the Sinocisation policies of the martial law era, when the Kuomintang government strove to create a strong centralised Chinese culture, with local customs and languages giving way. In addition, indigenous workers were used as cheap migrant labour during Taiwan’s rapid industrialisation.

These displaced workers included some of the band members’ parents, who worked in factories, shipyards and fishing boats to make ends meet. “Wherever there was labor available, our parents would go,” they tell me. “Most of the jobs were passed along through word of mouth among people from the same tribe — one person introducing another.”

In their younger days, this meant moving constantly, setting up tents at the edge of the city and often going hungry. They say they “remember a friend’s family owned a restaurant, and (we) would wash dishes in exchange for leftover food, just to fill our stomachs.” But through it all, they used art and music as outlets to express themselves and work through their feelings.

By the time of their sophomore album, 2018’s Lady of the Ocean, the first released under the Wind Music record label, Outlet Drift had developed a more mature, individual sound, with a clearer connection to their local identity. The members had moved back to their home village in Taitung at different times and for different reasons—Lin Ken to take care of his grandmother, Putad to start a family—but they all agreed that the pace of city life wasn’t for them. The village allowed them a more natural, deliberate rhythm to life, while also offering them a regular flow of musical inspiration. 

“Life in the tribe is filled with music”, they told me later over email, “whether during rituals, farming, work, weddings, funerals, or even mealtimes, there are always songs being sung.”

In Lady of the Ocean, the band had both honed their vision and agreed on a mission larger than the music itself - to revive traditions and spread the word about their people and culture. Their songs were mostly sung in the Amis language, and incorporated chants and signature melodic patterns from traditional Aboriginal tunes.

Their latest album, released in August 2025, is called Masonolay i Cepo’ and draws even more directly from the Amis culture. The title is literally just the band’s name in the Amis language, and signifies a return to home. After years of living away in other parts of the island, after tours and showcases overseas, after musical journeys through various styles and genres, the record drills insistently on themes of return.

Many of the new songs were recorded outdoors, incorporating ambient sounds and the natural reverberation of the mountains. This creates a very transparent, organic sound, which the trio honour by avoiding the urge to pad out the musical beds with studio overdubs. The album is heavily instrumental, with the band’s harmony vocals coming in discrete sections, rather than the repeated verse-chorus-verse forms of earlier albums. 

Outlet Drift had toyed with the idea of outdoor recording for some time, and they’d tried scouting suitable locations for the album a number of times, first in areas like Baluowan, near the ocean in Hualien; then south of the Central Mountain Ranges in Miali District. However, their plans got consistently stifled by the elements, due to road collapses from earthquakes, landslides and heavy rain. Eventually, after performing at a festival organised by the Hunter School, they connected with the Lalauran Community in Taitung, and were able to spend three days and nights recording there, both in the plains and deep in the valleys. 

Listening to Masonolay i Cepo’, themes of nature appear wherever you focus. Water is a crucial component for the band, in both symbolic and practical ways. It’s directly referenced in all three of their album titles and many of the song names. The song Kitiw translates as the Keeper of the Flowing Waters, and refers to a man in the village whose role is to make sure the river waters flow smoothly down the mountain. Guitarist Usan found himself in a similar position recently.

“It’s a very important job and I have experience (with it) now,” he says “because I need to fix the  water (going into) our house. It’s not for the whole village, it's just for my family.” But that meant he would regularly have to go up the mountain like the character in the song, listening to the sounds of the rocks, of water, of animals, and using them as the basis for their band’s music.

Many songs on the album draw inspiration from this mixture of traditional symbolism and personal experience. O Fades (Karma), another track previously released on the single Drifting, has lyrics in English and Mandarin and refers to experiences that both bassist Putad and drummer Lin Ken had in the US, at separate times. 

“I was working on a project with indigenous people from the South; from Papua New Guinea, from Madagascar,” she says. “We did a collaboration, so we were on tour in the US, but I didn't have a work visa so I got sent back to Taiwan.”

She recalls being held in a small room at the airport for 17 hours, feeling scared and homesick and just wanting to be back home.

“I wrote this song because I think God was telling me I should not do this. That I need to put more into my village. Like telling me I should stay in my land.”

After we wrapped up the interview and finished our coffees, we took a few photos with the band outside the café. They are much better at posing than us, expertly switching between goofy and serious. I asked what they were up to for the rest of the day. They said they were going to the hot springs in nearby Hualien, to get away from the winter cold, and asked us if we wanted to come. We said we couldn’t, that our train tickets back to Taipei were already booked and we needed to catch the last train of the day.

We missed out on the water of the hot springs, but with an hour to kill, we headed down to the port, to at least get another glimpse of the water from the ocean. We walked through the marina, which was closed, but which stood out as a symbol of modern life and industrial development in this otherwise sleepy part of Taiwan. We eventually headed back to the bus stop, walking past the church, still in full flow, music blaring out of upright speakers at the edge of the driveway.

We peeked in for a second, then turned and looked back down the hill, as twilight set over the water. It’s easy to see what makes someone want to return to it. To its calm, to its vastness. But returning to what matters takes effort—whether it’s home, or community, or tradition. Outlet Drift are willing to put that effort in.