Alt-rock band Wellsaid new album Regretopia, Hong Kong’s music community, and goes viral on TikTok

It’s not hard to decode the title of Wellsaid’s new album, regrettopiathat like great art blurs the boundaries between the personal and the political. “Everyone lives in a land of regret, it’s universal,” says Rocky Sum Lok-kei, leader of the homegrown alt-rock group, “especially in Hong Kong. We’re always thinking about missed opportunities, what could have been, not just personal decisions, but the state of things.”

Perhaps there’s a point of irony that, while the 31-year-old chastises rose-tinted nostalgia for the missed opportunities of the naïve Nineties, he’s spent the better part of a decade making music that pays such heartfelt homage to the alternative guitar of the time. music

Still, the quartet’s latest release, streaming now with a physical release show at MOM Livehouse on October 27, marks a progression of sorts. On the one hand, Sum’s lyrical lens has shifted, from documenting his own disorder and discontent (“drinking to myself,” says a Wellsaid refrain), to chronicling the world at large, though a world at a distance Released on new local label Un.Tomorrow, parts of regrettopia read like a love letter to the bubble of Hong Kong’s self-referential indie scene, a microcosm for the city’s collective experience.

“At that point I changed the way I wrote: I used to write only from my perspective, what I see and feel about things,” says Sum, a university teaching assistant by day. “This time I’m trying to channel more the community, the people I’m with and work with, what we’re collectively feeling about things in this scene. This time I want to park my personal side for the collective consciousness.”

The opening single, an incongruously jaunty, noisy grunge titled “Imaginary Road Trip,” pays homage to a common playlist created by Sum’s friends that imagines the shared soundtrack of a post-apocalyptic road trip. pandemic they knew they would never have done. take (none of them can drive). “Since then, a lot of people we know have left Hong Kong,” says Sum, “and it became a symbol of the condition of bringing these people and this love together.”

Meanwhile, “Like water in water”, is named after a half-understood maxim of the French philosopher Georges Bataille, who reflected on a state of human immanence. “It describes how I feel at the live show: personal boundaries are broken and people are together in the noise, we all become one,” says Sum. “We come together and then we dissolve, which is what I feel about the Hong Kong community. There are times when everyone seems to converge on some ideas, and then everything seems to fade away, it’s very fleeting.”