“A lot of people write off Hong Kong as being dead, right, but it’s not – there’s a lot going on,” asserts Sum Lok-kei, better known on the scene as Rocky, frontman of popular Hong Kong emo turned alt-rock band Wellsaid.
“It’s a favourite narrative – Hong Kong is dead!” chimes in Jason Cheung, sitting to his left, recognisable to those in the know as a founding member and key creative force behind post-punk darlings (turned electro experimenters) David Boring.
Combating this tired trope was one of the key reasons Sum, Cheung and a cast of like-minded scene figures clubbed together to form Un.Tomorrow, a collective and record label that is celebrating its first anniversary next month. The team can look back on a productive 11 months during which the imprint dropped four new albums by Hong Kong acts, plus a smattering of singles and an archive release.
The label name — 聽日未知 (ting1 jat6 mei6 zi1) in Chinese — was inspired by the counterculture Beatles anthem Tomorrow Never Knows, while the Chinese tagline “今日唔知聽日事，做咗先講” (gam1 jat6 m4 zi1 ting1 jat6 si6，zou6 zo2 sin1 gong2) “has the meaning of, you don’t know what the fuck’s gonna happen tomorrow, so you might as well do it today,” says Sum.
He clarifies: “The name really just suggests that we’re looking at possibilities. But honestly, it’s not just us being optimistic. It is true that there are more things compared to 10 years ago. There are more people putting on shows, there’s more music, the bands are more active and more ambitious. Everyone talks about the old days like they were wonderful. Back then our favourite bands would play to 30 people. Now, your favourite [Hong Kong] band will play to… 100 people.”
Co-founding members of Un.Tomorrow, Leung Wing-lai, Sum Lok-kei, Jason Cheung – Photo by Onn Sek for Zolima CityMag
Doing it together
Despite the name, it’s notable that Un.Tomorrow is more concerned with celebrating the here, now and then than looking to the future. Halfway through our interview, Sum and Cheung are joined by fellow co-founder Leung Wing-lai – frontman of An Id Signal 意色樓 – who takes a free seat at our table in the back room of Kowloon hipster hangout Bound. Un.Tomorrow’s latest release is the long-awaited third album from Leung’s “soul punk” band: The Path Where Grief and Joy Intersect (悲喜交集的路線) dropped digitally on Valentine’s Day – 12 years after its predecessor. The label is planning a full vinyl release and launch gig in April.
Leung says Hong Kong bands have long had a DIY ethos. “We would play our own shows, make our own records,” he says. “If you do things alone, you can go fast,” adds Cheung. “But if you want to go far, you do it in a group,” adds Cheung. “As you go along you realise that by doing it together, that will give you more perspective – the clash of ideas will spring new things. So we go from DIY to DIT – do it together.”
Several earlier indie imprints have served as an antidote to Hong Kong’s major-label, Cantopop hegemony. Most notably, in the early 2000s, Harbour Records — which celebrated its 20th anniversary last year — released CDs by key agitators including AMK, False Alarm and Kim Tak Building. However in the past decade its output has been restricted to new releases by established mainstays My Little Airport and Teenage Riot, according to its Discogs profile, while its listed web URL no longer exists. “Well, that’s where you see the limitations of labels, per se,” says Sum. “Like, is it a label now, or is it just MLA [My Little Airport] doing their stuff?”
While no music fan would ever accuse Hong Kong of having too much noise, the existing maze of grassroots promoters and platforms can be overwhelming to navigate, and decidedly niche. “There’s a lot of small promoters because they each focus on very different sorts of music,” says Sum, who has experience of both promoting shows and releasing music under his own Sweaty & Cramped brand. “We have a lot of variety, but we don’t have a lot of volume.”
Covid and booze
Like so many things, Un.Tomorrow’s genesis can be traced to two surprisingly productive evils: alcohol and Covid-19. Frustrated pandemic-era drinking sessions spawned the desire to make something happen. “We had multiple conversations about the same thing. We would drink and get emotional,” remembers Sum. “And during the same conversations we were also talking about wanting to do something for the community, for the scene,” says Cheung.
What the millennial-aged Un.Tomorrow team believe they can bring to the party is their collective experience and shared expertise not just as musicians, but as self-publishers and start-up promoters. As well as Sum, 31, Cheung, 36, and Leung, 42, the collective’s core team currently includes Medius Chung, part of indie music platform Zenegeist, Mike Chan Kwok-wai from promotion company Domiproduction 島米制作, and the group’s visual director Lotko.
The Un.Tomorrow brand was introduced to the world in March 2023 with a two-day, 10-act festival that made pains to criss-cross between sounds, scenes and eras, with fresher acts like Arches and The Crush programmed next to the founders’ own established bands. The event was titled 集合 (zaap6 hap6), or Assembly 1 — a deliberately derivative name paying homage to a 90s mixtape called 集感 (siu1 zaap6) — although there are no current plans for part two. “After the event, we faced some criticism, for sure,” notes Sum. “[People said] it was a bunch of old farts trying to do old fart shit. I think that was fair – it was very dude-heavy.”
Scene forebearers Life Was All Silence reunited especially for the event. “We had to drag them out of the fridge a little bit, slap them on the face and be like, ‘Fucking play,’” recalls Sum. The Un.Tomorrow team later returned the favour by releasing the post-rock outfit’s brilliant 2014 album The People digitally for the first time. “They put that out 10 years ago, and no one fucking bothered to upload it [to streaming platforms],” he adds. “I’m like, what the fuck was wrong with you? And they were like, ‘Yeah, we’re indie.’”
The launch gigs also introduced Un.Tomorrow’s first release A Night to Call, Tales to Tell 嚼事知夜, by Wong Hin-yan, who performed songs from the album backed by musicians from jazz collective Fountain de Chopin. The sprawling 2LP live set exists on wax solely because Cheung was in the audience for the April 2023 performance the recording captures. “Wong Hin-yan is a very self-contained guy,” says Cheung. “We were at his show and I was totally blown away. So I just talked to him, I was like, ‘Man, I’m a vinyl collector, if you’ve got this recorded somehow, I’ll be happy to put it out.’ The collective didn’t even exist yet. I just blurted it out – it was a big statement.”
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- Jason Cheung of David Boring
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- Leung Wing-lai, of An Id Signal
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- Sum Lok-kei, Aka Rocky of Wellsaid
New ambitions
It would be easy to lay a charge of insularity — or worse, nepotism — at the collective’s output to date. Of the first four albums released, two are by bands fronted by the co- founders we met. Before the An Id Signal release, Wellsaid’s excellent third album Regretopia came out on Un.Tomorrow in late 2024. Plus, Cheung joined forces with Brian Chu and Xsgacha vocalist Lilly Gato in a low-radar new trio Restless Waters, which dropped a new single through the brand at the end of 2024. And there’s no doubt that the long-awaited second David Boring album will be an Un.Tomorrow release.
But the collective argue that they’re just the guinea pigs, experimenting with their own work while they develop the skills and build the networks to better distribute more Hong Kong artists in future. “My motivation is to raise the standard of things on an organisational level,” says Sum. “I think a lot of bands in Hong Kong suffer from being very disorganised. For example, most bands would put out a single without any press release. But you need that! So we’re trying to provide that assistance.”
He continues: “When I started playing music, the only aspiration that a Hong Kong band could have was: we’re going to open for our favourite band. I think that’s changed. Now it’s more like, I want to continue playing music and continue growing. The bands today are just more ambitious, and I think that’s great.”
Un.Tomorrow releases to date
- UN.T 000: Wong Hin Yan – A Night to Call, Tales to Tell (2LP, 2024)
- xsgacha x Badmath – “冇有形狀” (digital single, 2024)
- UN.A 000: Live Was All Silence – The People (originally released 2014; re-distributed through digital platforms as part of Un.Archive project, 2024)
- UN.T 001: Wellsaid – Regretopia (LP, 2024)
- An Id Signal – “The Path Where Grief and Joy Intersect” (digital single, 2024)
- Emptybottles – “Polaroid” (digital single, 2024)
- 不平靜水域 Restless Waters – “高純度愛” (digital single, 2024)
- UN.T 003: 龢wo4 Brian Chu – Mannaka (cassette, 2025)
- UN.T 002: An Id Signal – The Path Where Grief and Joy Intersect (悲喜交集的路線)(LP, 2025)
- 不平靜水域 Restless Waters – “不安之墓” (digital single, 2025)