Laughing (Quietly) Into The Sunset
From the start, Sunset Rollercoaster was meant as a joke band. The Taiwanese indie darlings’ incarnation from their debut album, as a bluesy guitar-heavy trio, was itself a joke. Their original lineup had been an electronic duo, made up of Tseng Kuo-Hung (Kuo Kuo, or Kuo, for short) and friend Kevin Lee, who modelled themselves after mid-2000s dance acts like Justice and Boys Noize. The two friends made loops to get a hang of Ableton Live, released music on MySpace, and, once they added drummer Lo Tsun-Lung to the fold, played live sets around southern Taipei, mostly to their friends in other bands.
One day, in the rehearsal studio ahead for an upcoming live set, the trio decided to ditch their laptops, dump their synthesizers, and bring out their guitars instead. As a way to screw with their audience (i.e. those same friends) and their expectations.
“It's a really fun idea”, band leader Kuo told me last year, “to fuck (with) people's expectations because they pay money.”
With his thick-lensed glasses and gentle smile, Kuo comes across as sincere and down-to-earth. But there is a sharp, impish streak behind the disarming exterior. He enjoys subverting the narrative, taking sharp turns, and confounding expectations. And that instinct hasn’t left him after all these years.
“I'm still kind of a troll,” he admits.
What has changed, though, in the 15 or so years since that first provocation, is how much he has learned to care. Or, to put it another way, the gradual journey from not caring at all to perhaps caring too much.
“Every time I listen to the first album (Bossa Nova), I still feel the energy—this kind of ‘I don't give a fuck’ attitude in the younger me,” Kuo says.
But these days?
“Now I give too much of a fuck!”
Kuo didn’t give a fuck for quite a while in the early days. He bounce around in dingy basement rehearsal spaces, head locked to the beat, steady hand on the bass in seminal Taiwanese indie rock acts like Boyz & Girl and Forests 森林, as well as guitar on that minimalist early lineup for Sunset Rollercoaster (let’s call it version 1.0). In a scene dominated by expansive shoegaze and post-rock bands, the young power trio stood out for their stark simplicity. Guitar, bass and drums. No pedals. All riffs, pure grooves, no gimmicks.
The point where the giving of fucks took a decided turn was around 2012, after Kuo worked with established singer-songwriter Desert Chang and he observed how music could become an actual career. He then re-envisioned the band as a more nimble, professional ensemble.
Although that first album, Bossa Nova, released in 2011, mostly feels and sounds like a different band, deep within it one can find the foundation for what would come later. Kuo imagined the band (again, half-jokingly) as a forgotten 1970s artist that was being re-discovered by generations in the future. A sort of Sugar Man from the Beautiful Isle. That’s why the songs were in English, a language that he is comfortable with but is still steeped in mystery for him.
Rather than a forgotten album by an imaginary seventies artist, Bossa Nova comes across instead as a forgotten compilation by multiple familiar seventies artists. There is the minimalist garage fury of “Pinky Pinky”, the sunny acoustic lightness of “Bomb of Love”, and the spy-movie ska of “Hogi Hogi LaLa Jo”. There are hints of musicians as disparate as Iggy Pop, Paul Simon, and Neil Young, which some might argue prevents the album from achieving a coherent sound.
There was immediate promise in the first record—it’s very crisply produced, especially for a debut, with longtime studio collaborator Yuchain Wang, and showcases a band with the talent to go in a number of different directions. But two songs from the album in particular show the path the band would eventually take.
The first is “I Know You Know I Love You”—a pretty, earnest ballad, still a concert staple. Its slow tempo, slick sheen, and tempered dynamics formed the blueprint for many Sunset Rollercoaster (2.0) songs, from subsequent records like Jinji Kikko and Cassa Nova. After a 5-year break, the band had re-emerged in fuller form. The rough edges had been sanded off, the surface was polished and the final package shone under bright lights.
2018’s Vanilla Villa continued the expansion into every fractal synonym for soft rock: city pop, blue eyed soul, AOR. It’s an undeniably delicious sound, crafted with a delicate touch—keys are tickled, cymbals are tapped, and vocals are gently cooed. The guitars and keys melt in layers of gooey analogue reverb. Every tone is gorgeous and lush and meticulously recorded. It’s the yachtiest of yacht pop, and that’s solely what it aims to be.
The other track from their debut album that hinted at the band’s future sound, “My Monday Throne”, was a swinging, jazz-tinged number, punctuated by angular, off-beat guitar licks and an extended instrumental outro with a brass ensemble. In that context, it seemed like a playful throwaway at the end of a searching, eclectic album. Like the band having a laugh, and the engineer stretching their muscles for a session.
But that inauspicious outro also hinted at the jammier, spacier element of the band’s work, evident in 2020’s Soft Storm, an album as Year-of-Covid-coded as you will ever find, and even some of their latest work, like the recent collaboration with Korean indie rockers HYUKOH.
The two bands started playing together in 2024 and have practically willed an East Asian indie supergroup into being, selling out arena shows in both their home countries, playing the main stage at Fuji Rock this year, and releasing well-received joint studio and live albums (AAA and AAA Live).
Their collaboration seems designed for the live stage, with sparsely written but densely arranged songs, heavy on percussive interludes and instrumental vamps, and a coordinated onstage look that combines freak folk weirdness with slick Uniqlo tie-ins.
All these moves are smart and they’ve helped Sunset Rollercoaster build a sustainable career as an independent artist in a precarious musical ecosystem. Who can fault them? They’re great musicians, consummate professionals, and they have become a model and inspiration for countless Taiwanese bands.
Personally, though (and I know I’m being selfish here), I just wish they’d go back to giving fewer fucks.
I wish to hear more of the youthful abandon present on old tracks like “Pinky Pinky”. I wish to hear drummer Tsun-Lung, Kuo’s longtime collaborator all the way back to his first band Boyz & Girl, drive the songs the way he used to in the early days, elevating even conventional rock progressions with clever displaced rhythms.
Oh and I know it’s too much to ask, but what I wouldn’t give to hear a little of the classic Kuo rasp again. Yes, he can croon and sound honey-smooth in your headphones, but have you heard the man scream? (Just ask an old indie head about “the Ah-Ah song”.)
Listening to the first few songs from the band’s new album, Quit Quietly, there were hints of a return to a simpler, rawer sound. “Tumor Humor” starts off with spare keyboard chords and an unadorned vocal delivery. “Mistakes” has a propulsive energy reminiscent of early rockers like “No Man’s Land”. Kuo has mentioned that he wrote all these songs on acoustic guitar, and didn’t bring full arrangements to the band, as he had in recent albums. This does result in a more open record, spacious in its arrangements, and patient in its development.
At the same time, modern fans will still get the trademark synth escapades and cascading key modulations in the proggy “Everything I Have”, while “Piccolo Amore” weaves jazzy guitar licks with scatty vocal lines, and ends with an a cappella choir expressing its desire to “be your dog”. If the band were planning to take their lyrics super seriously all of a sudden, they weren’t going to start with this release.
The album title itself might be another hint of what’s to come. When I spoke to Kuo last year, he suggested the next Sunset Rollercoaster record (i.e. this one) could be the band’s last.
So is this their swan song? Are they, in fact, quietly quitting? Sliding into the sunset as their name suggests? Or is this another joke, deadpan and unsuspected, in a career full of them?
Maybe the answer is not for us to find out, but for someone decades in the future, a young fan discovering this album randomly and by chance, wondering where and when all those sweet retro sounds came from.