Taiwanese indie band Sunset Rollercoaster have had a busy five years since the release of <i>SOFT STORM</i>. The five-piece was named Best Band at the Golden Melody Awards on the back of that LP and followed that up with a date at Coachella, a critically acclaimed collaborative album <i>AAA</i> with Korean indie band HYUKOH and a major tour. So it’s tempting to read the title of 2025’s <i>QUIT QUIETLY</i> as a reaction to that non-stop roller coaster ride. “Call it a farewell to particular stage and a gradual transition to a state of less talk, more writing,” lead singer and songwriter Tseng Kuo Hung tells Apple Music. “This album feels a little like a diary or chit-chat, with sketches of everyday life and fragments of ideas.”
Chock full of the band’s hallmark jazz, Britpop and psychedelia in the service of catchy pop tunes, the LP represents a back-to-basics approach to songwriting. Where Tseng demos in the past tended to be fully fleshed out with drum, synth and bass parts, he’s come to appreciate the value of limitations and wrote with only an acoustic guitar to solidify his ideas. “Styles and arrangements weren’t really planned out in advance this time,” he says. “They were determined by the songs themselves. For some, I had a basic framework over the completed melody and lyrics, but others were arranged naturally and organically in the studio with the band.” The same goes for the band’s collaborators, which include Oh Hyuk of HYUKOH and indie artist Anpu. “With some of the songs, we passed them to friends when they were still at the work tape stage, so things happened naturally,” Tseng says.
Taking up the gauntlet thrown by the album title, opener “Wind of Tomorrow” turns a reassuring Japanese aphorism into a Britpop dream of moving on, sentiments echoed in the hypnotic crescendo of “Mistakes”. Tseng also finds philosophical comedy in the quirks of daily life, mining the nerve-racking wait on a negative test result for “Humor Tumor” and singing a sweet jazz ballad from the perspective of an Italian greyhound on “Piccolo Amore”.
The band also revisit the cosmic themes of 2019 EP <i>VANILLA VILLA</i> on “Satellite”, a chamber-pop lament for space dog Laika with harmonies from Leah Dou, and “Grow”, an extraterrestrial love song inspired by a Ketagalan origin myth, with the indigenous BDC choir sweetening the track’s country sound. And “Charon’s Gone”, a space-rock jam co-written with drummer Tsun Lung Lo, depicts the hot-and-cold relationship between Pluto and its moon. But whether high-flying or Earth-bound, Tseng’s English-language lyrics are characteristically allusive and impressionistic. “I have a habit of writing down keywords during high-stress travel,” he says. “Then I’ll ponder over them to keep that inspiration sharp and eventually, in the still of the night, I’ll write them into a song.”
Far from announcing that they’re quiet quitting, Sunset Rollercoaster is merely ready to move into new territory. “In Taiwan, the band’s popularity has always been limited to the scene, for those who know,” Tseng says. “We’re still going to be ourselves, though. Compared to our previous flamboyance, there’s a sense of maturity here that’s surfaced over time. But I hope we still have some romance within that cool.”
