The hazy, effervescent sonic poetry of Lucid Express appears bathed in a nocturnal, neon half-light – perhaps because it’s normally carved out after midnight. The dreamy indie band are among Hong Kong’s greatest guitar-based exports, one of the few acts to have built a sustained reputation overseas. Next month, Lucid Express embark on their second US tour, a tiring trek passing through 13 cities in 16 days, tracing a U shape down from Seattle to San Francisco, across Texas, through Chicago and ending at a New York City festival.
But back home, three of the quintet work in the same restaurant, which means they rarely get to music making before midnight. We meet at 10pm, after lead singer Kim Ho Tsz-ki has clocked off from a shift washing dishes. “I have to make a living,” she says stoically. “I don’t have money.”
“We used to practice until 3am every time, and then sleep in the studio,” remembers guitarist Andy Tsang Wing-tak, riding the cargo elevator to the group’s cramped rehearsal space in a Kwai Hing industrial building. “Nowadays our livers are not so good.”
Ahead of the US tour, Lucid Express’ local warm-up gig at Mom Livehouse has already sold out; opening the March 23 show is Vegetable (from Singapore) and The Whisperer (from Taiwan), flipping on its head the convention that local bands always open for the better-known, more exotic, visitors. Lucid Express ended 2024 on a similar high, closing Clockenflap’s Park Stage, although Ho privately raged that the Saturday night slot meant she didn’t get to see UK 90s icons Suede, who were performing concurrently. Amid their trademark walls of psychedelic synth, scuzzy guitars, driving rhythms and curling smokescreens, Lucid Express’ triumphant, trippy but anthemic set felt like a moment of validation – and community. “Buy our merch – if you want,” Ho told fans as the set wound up. “Or don’t. You’re poor. We’re poor. We get it.”
Lucid Express at Clockenflap, 2024 – Photo courtesy Lucid Express
Hometown heroes
Lucid Express make the most unlikely rock stars, utterly unassuming and painfully self-deprecating in person, and almost annoyingly nonchalant about what they’ve achieved. Their list of accomplishments unarguably puts them at the centre of any potted history of the past decade’s indie scene: they’ve shared concert bills with American bands Beach Fossils, Blushing and The Bilinda Butchers, and UK-based personal heroes The Cribs and Yuck. They’ve previously toured Southeast Asia and Europe, as well as the US, and been hyped by global muso publications The Quietus, Drowned in Sound, Bandcamp and NME, whose stock adjectives praised the group’s “shimmering guitars and whirring synthesizers.”
International critics love to listen for the sound of urban decay and post-protest claustrophobia in Lucid Express’ swirls of electronic fog, despite its heavy debt to early-90s British shoegaze bands My Bloody Valentine and Slowdive. (The term was originally coined to describe bands whose reliance on guitar effects pedals meant they spent the majority of concerts staring down at their feet rather than out at the audience.) But one needs to be careful with the “S word” around Lucid Express. As warm, welcoming and self-effacing as they seem, the city’s best-known shoegaze band don’t really like being pigeonholed. Not that their own record company is listening: “shoegaze from Hong Kong” reads the hype sticker on the band’s awesome, self-titled debut LP, which was released in 2021 after nearly a decade of ardour, effort and deliberation.
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- Lucid Express at Clockenflap, 2024 – Photo courtesy Lucid Express
A heavy Thud
The initial seeds for Lucid Express were planted in 2012, when guitarist Tsang answered an online advert posted by bassist Samuel Chan Cheuk-wang on a Hong Kong music forum – the latter brought his younger brother, drummer Chan Cheuk-wai (who goes by Wai) along, although they didn’t admit to being siblings until several weeks later. “Yeah, they wanted to keep some secret from me, maybe,” remembers the guitarist with mock suspicion. (Today the brothers run a Japanese restaurant in Tsuen Wan, where Ho works part time when she’s not teaching or playing music.)
As a trio, they jammed without direction on tunes by “really old-fashioned bands” like Muse and Radiohead for around two years, before Tsang brought his new classmates from the Hong Kong Design Institute along to jam. It was of course future bandmates Ho and Kung Siu-yum, better known as guitarist Sky. “Andy asked me on the train: do you listen to Two Door Cinema Club?” remembers Ho. An affirmative answer sealed the deal, and a band called Thud was born.
On a pivotal visit to Taiwan, Samuel Chan picked up DIIV’s 2012 debut album Oshin and My Bloody Valentine’s (MBV) Loveless, a seminal touchstone of the shoegaze movement released in 1991 that was infamously reported to have cost HK$2.5 million to record. “When I heard Loveless, I was shocked,” he remembers. “Why is this music so loud and dark? But I can feel some sad mood inside.”
Tsang and Kung fell in love with guitarist and producer Kevin Shields’ walls of screeching yet beatific guitar, and began gearing up with dozens of effects pedals. “So we tried to figure out what this music is,” says Tsang, who today day-jobs as a guitar tutor. “We tried to learn how to make this type of sound – listening for the pedals, the reverb, the ambience, the distortion. We took all these elements and tried to make them fit in the music we were making.”
When Ho left Hong Kong for a month, the four guys began writing their own original material for the first time. “So we already had these songs just waiting for her,” remembers Kung. “But then when she got back, she said: this song is not good,” laughs Tsang.
“We don’t really communicate in language to each other,” adds Kung. “We just play.”
Lucid Express – Photo by Francis Consorte McCrea
Get Lucid
Despite the band’s local reputation and live workload, Lucid Express’ recorded pace, it must be said, hasn’t always been rapid. While still named Thud, the quintet released the four-track Floret EP in 2015 — complete with a bonus remix of spacy lead track “Lime” by Yuck’s Max Bloom — followed by the strongly MBV-flavoured singles “Prime of Pride” and “Ado” (in 2016 and 2018, respectively). Finally, a debut album arrived in 2021, but only after the unlikely delay of a sudden rebrand. Fun fact: Lucid Express was originally intended as the name of Thud’s debut album, but instead became the self-titled debut of a newly minted group. (Floret was eventually released on vinyl, credited to Lucid Express and with a second side of extra remixes, a year later).
The underground rumour mill suggests that such a counterintuitive move, after years of building hype as Thud, was thrust on them as a legal necessity after signing to American indie label Kanine Records. The band refuses to be drawn far on the topic. “When life comes, and there’s some decision you need to make, but actually it’s quite natural, in a way,” says Kung obliquely. “Someone asks you, do you want to change the name? Ah, maybe I need to change the name.”
The reband also offered a chance to redefine the band, especially for Chan Cheuk-wai, who used the fresh beginning to switch from electronic to acoustic drums. “The name Lucid Express for me is like a new start, it’s like the official debut for us,” adds the drummer. “After we changed the name, I tried to play more huge.”
“For me, when I listened to this [new] name, I realised that it’s the name leading me in a different direction,” adds Kung.
California dreaming
Lucid Express may finally outgrow the MBV comparisons and the dreaded shoegaze label with their forthcoming second album, which the musicians vaguely promise will be ready for release later this year. Kung hints at a “more acoustic, more harmonious, more lucid” sound, moving away from the electronic synth and shimmer, to utilise an unlikely sonic palette of flute, lap steel guitar, and even theremin. “So you can imagine we came from California,” laughs Tsang.
Meanwhile Ho, who has long hidden her voice low in the sonic haze, rendering lyrics indecipherable, promises a “more upfront” vocal delivery, inspired by recent classical singing lessons. “Now we have more tools, more weapons,” she says. “A lot of the time, especially with our latest newer songs, I need to drill on the melodies, because I want to make them better,. I want to be a melody maker.”
Just as the band’s approach has changed over the past decade — less late nights rehearsing and reduced alcohol consumption on tour, plus a wider cast of instruments and bolder hooks — Lucid Express has also changed the lives of its members. It’s remarkable that most of the musicians were in their teens when they began playing together, and yet now, after navigating the turmoil of their 20s as a close-knit unit, all five members are now for the first time over 30. As well as Chan Cheuk-wai’s louder drum sound, soft-spoken Samuel Chan admits he has become bolder and more confident playing on stage, while Tsang says Lucid Express has made him a better problem solver.
For Kung, the band was a gateway to becoming a full-time sound artist, while Ho was half-forced into being the group’s de facto PR manager. “And, I think the band kind of gives me some purpose,” she adds. “Because I don’t really have anything [else] I want to do in my life.”
One thing the quintet are all in instant agreement about is the prospect of another decade together, even if it means sharing the same bumpy tour buses and dingey hotel rooms they’re preparing to weather on the upcoming tour. “Will we be playing together in 2035? Of course, yes!” implores Tsang. “We’ve got a lot of demos we didn’t figure out, a lot of songs we didn’t record. We’ve got hundreds more ideas to realise.”