PREMIERE: Hong Kong Hardcore Band Regret Release Song Dedicated to Ethnic Minorities

Today I’m proud to present my new band Regret.

The initial idea for the band was through a rekindling of friendship between myself and one of my old drummers from a band I used to play in called King Ly Chee (荔枝王). The drummer that I’ve always stayed in contact with is my old friend Egas who lives out in Macau. The summer of 2020 we started talking about how we both just want to play in a band that feels way more straight-ahead – a very much “plug-in and play” type of band. We talked about how we miss the MESSINESS and RAWNESS of hardcore punk so we started throwing some ideas around back and forth literally via Whatsapp. Hahahahaha…the reason we couldn’t get together is that, as mentioned above, he lives in Macau and I live here in Hong Kong. Our borders have been closed to each other since February of 2020 (that’s also why my other band Dagger has been on hold because the drummer of that band, Ivan, also lives in Macau). As we started getting a bunch of songs together I knew INSTANTLY who was going to play bass – the amazing and uber-talented Kuro who has done time in so many Hong Kong punk rock bands from Oi Squad to Defiant Scum. She not only plays bass in the band but sings in it too which is fucking MAD exciting to lifelong hardcore, punk, metalhead like myself! To have her voice on these songs opens the music up (hopefully) to more than just us men…hardcore, punk, metal belongs to all of us regardless of gender (binary and nonbinary).

Many months later we recorded all our stuff and today we present to you the first taste of our debut EP.

The song we chose to go with is something that we all feel very strongly about – ‘We Exist’. According to Kuro, “We went with this song because Hong Kong is a place where, unfortunately, there is a contingent of people who think they’re superior to people of darker skin tones. With this idiotic mentality, they’re completely ignoring the fact that a LOT of different ethnicities of people were born and raised here. They’ve also contributed to Hong Kong. Hong Kong is what it is because of them as well.” In this song, we sing directly to ethnic minorities of Hong Kong and invited members of different communities who call Hong Kong home (Nepali, Filipino, Pakistani, and of course Chinese) to drop a line or two. Some of the people we invited aren’t actually singers – they were just so pent up with rage with their life experiences here that when we put a mic in front of them they just let loose.

The EP is being released on cassette formats by: Infree Records (Hong Kong), Real Deal Records (China), Freshtown Records (Malaysia), and Lawless Jakarta (Indonesia).

More information on pre-orders coming soon!

For now, go jam the song below and share it far and wide!

https://www.facebook.com/regrethongkong/