What are afters? The after party, explained

Afters is what happens when the club shuts and nobody wants to go home. The lights come up, everyone spills onto the pavement, and someone says the four most dangerous words in nightlife: "someone's doing an afters".

If you searched "afters" and got a list of dessert shops, this is the other meaning. Context is everything, and if you're reading this at 4am, you already know which one you meant.

There are six kinds of afters, and you have been at least four of them. Find yourself in which afters are you.

What does "afters" actually mean?

Afters, aftersies, the after party, the after hours, the kickback, the house. Same idea, different postcodes. It's the unofficial second half of the night, usually:

• at someone's flat, occasionally at someone's flat who did not fully agree to this
• after the venue closes, so anywhere from 2am to properly light outside
• smaller than the club, louder than the neighbours would like
• built entirely on word of mouth

Nobody sends an invite to an afters. That's the whole point. Afters is not an event, it's a rumour with a location.

Why afters are so hard to find

Here's the thing that makes afters uniquely chaotic: the information about where it is travels worse than the party itself.

The address gets said out loud in a smoking area, over a bassline, to four people, one of whom is leaving. It gets typed into a group chat that has 200 unread messages and three people who fell asleep. It gets sent as a pin, then the plan changes, then nobody sends the new pin.

So you get the classic afters failure modes:

• You went home. Everyone else went to an afters. You find out on Sunday.
• You're outside a building. You do not know the flat number. Nobody is answering their phone.
• Half the group is at one afters, half went to another, and both halves think they're at the real one.
• You arrive at 5am. Everyone left at 4.40am.

The party isn't the hard part. Finding it is.

Afters etiquette, briefly

Since we're here: don't invite people the host hasn't met, don't be the one who wakes the neighbours in the stairwell, bring something, and know when it's over. When the host starts tidying, it's over. When the sun is properly up and someone puts on a podcast, it was over an hour ago.

How to actually find the afters

The fix isn't a better group chat. Group chats are for planning things in advance, and afters are the opposite of planned in advance.

What you need at 3am is a live answer to one question: who is still out, and where are they going?

That's what aftrs does. You flip yourself to partying when you're out, and the friends you choose can see you're still going. When the night moves to someone's flat, the people you want there can find it without ten messages and a dropped pin that points at the wrong side of the road.

• See which friends are still out, live, not a plan from six hours ago.
• Show where you are to the friends you choose, not to everyone forever.
• Go invisible the second you're done. You're invisible by default anyway.

Afters happen fast and quietly. The app is just there so the right people find the door.

So, afters or aftrs?

The word is afters. Our app is aftrs, same word, fewer letters, because we're cool like that.

Find your friends. Keep the night going. Disappear when you're done.