In 2003, Moroccan authorities jailed 14 metal fans for promoting Satanism and damaging Islam. In the days that followed, the arrests were met with mass protests of young Moroccans characterized as much by their anger at the injustice as they were by joy, celebration, and music. The resulting musical movement was named Nayda – from the Moroccan root n-w-D meaning “to rise” – it encouraged young Moroccans to creatively construct an essentially Moroccan identity that was liberated from the power of the state, inviting comparison to Spain’s 1980’s Movida movement (Caubet 2008). Fifteen years later, things have changed. Movida in Spain is celebrated with museum exhibitions that reframe the intentionally unstructured movement to fit within the boundaries of national institutions, and reinterpreted by contemporary pop music bands with a message seemingly distant from the movement’s anti-establishment roots (Nichols 2009). Nayda’s signature festival L’Boulevard came under fire in 2008 for accepting a royal grant to partially fund the festival (Caubet and Miller 2013). Following Stuart Hall’s (1998) definition of popular culture, the institutionalization of cultural movements is inevitable: the state will cynically appropriate symbols of the culture of the masses in order to exert control over popular consumption. The institutionalization of popular culture may also be entered into semi-willingly: in order for creative production to be sustainable, artists are forced to seek institutional legitimacy (Shapiro 2004). How, then, does the underground sustain itself while remaining liberated? In Morocco, an emergent underground culture has developed over the past five years in the form of the Hardzazat festival. The festival rejects institutionalization by aligning itself with the DIY ethic, embracing radical channels for creation and knowledge sharing (Hemphill and Leskowitz 2012). To eschew the reach of Moroccan institutions, the movement has forged a network of ties with DIY activists living outside of Morocco, making the movement sustainable through the support of a transnational community. In this paper, I will show how the Hardzazat movement maintains the sustainability of the underground through its connection to the transnational DIY movement. I will use public statements made on social media by the Hardzazat movement and ethnographic observations of the 2018 Hardzazat festival in order to trace how the movement aligns itself with anti-capitalist, anti-colonial, and anti-system DIY movements abroad in order to maintain an anti-establishment movement that is liberated from official institutions, and compare this movement-building with the experience of other underground movements such as Nayda.