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

It isn’t hard to decode the title of Wellsaid’s new album, Regretopia, which like much great art blurs the boundaries between the personal and political. “Everyone is living in a land of regret – it’s universal,” says Rocky Sum Lok-kei, frontman of the home-grown alt-rock group, “especially in Hong Kong. We’re always thinking about lost opportunities, what could have been – not just personal decisions, but the state of things.”

There’s a tinge of irony, perhaps, that while the 31-year-old chastises rosy-lens nostalgia for the missed opportunities of the naive 1990s, he’s spent the better part of a decade making music that pays such heartfelt homage to the era’s alternative guitar music.

Still, the quartet’s latest release, streaming now with a physical launch show at MOM Livehouse on October 27, marks a progression of sorts. For one, Sum’s lyrical lens has flipped, from documenting his own disorder and discontent (“drinking by myself”, runs a trademark Wellsaid refrain), to chronicling the world at large, albeit a world at arm’s length. Released on new local label Un.Tomorrow, parts of Regretopia read like a love letter to the bubble of Hong Kong’s self-referencing indie scene, a microcosm for the city’s collective experience.

“At this point I changed the way I write – I used to write just 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 the community more, people I hang out with and work with, what we are 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, quiet-loud grunge stomper titled “Imaginary Road Trip”, is a tribute to a communal playlist created by Sum’s scenester friends, imagining the shared soundtrack to a post-pandemic road trip they knew they’d never 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 a condition of bringing these people together, and this love together.”

“Like Water in Water”, meanwhile, is named after a half-comprehended maxim of French philosopher Georges Bataille, pondering a human state of immanence. “It describes how I feel in the live show – personal boundaries break down and people are just in the noise together, we all become one,” says Sum. “We come together, and then dissolve, which is how I feel about the Hong Kong community. There’s times when everyone seems to be converging on some ideas, and then it all seems to dissipate, it’s all so short-lived.”