Sunset Rollercoaster: From a Photo Booth Background Shot to Coachella, 14 Years of Singing Taipei Sunsets in English

30-second overview: Sunset Rollercoaster is an indie band formed in Taipei in 2009. They did something few in Taiwan’s indie scene had done: they sang subtropical Taipei entirely in English. After releasing their debut album Bossa Nova in 2011, they disbanded. In 2015, vocalist Kuo Kuo regrouped the band after being exempted from military service because of 1,300-degree myopia and after finishing his role as guitarist in Deserts Chang’s Algae band. “My Jinji,” from the 2016 EP JinJi Kikko, surpassed 100 million streams on Spotify¹; in 2018 they became the first Taiwanese band to appear on Audiotree Live in the United States; in 2023 they became the first Taiwanese band in more than two decades to be invited onto a major Coachella stage²; in 2024, AAA, their collaboration with the Korean band Hyukoh, received nine nominations at the 36th Golden Melody Awards and won three. A casually chosen Photo Booth background image became, 14 years later, the beam of light through which Taiwanese music was most clearly heard by the world.

In Taipei in 2010, a 19-year-old student sat in front of a MacBook. He had just created a MySpace band page and needed a profile pic. Not knowing what to photograph, he opened the Mac’s built-in Photo Booth. Among the presets was a background image: a roller coaster silhouette, a sunset. He chose it.

“That’s how the Rollercoaster came about,” Kuo Kuo (Tseng Kuo-hung) said in an interview eight years later.³

That casually selected background image later became everything about the band: its name, the cover of its first mini-EP, the temperament of its entire musical universe. It had not been calculated to represent anything, but 14 years later it represented something no one at the time could have predicted. The path by which Taiwanese music reached the world did not come from the K-pop industrial system, nor from government cultural diplomacy. The whole thing began with a 19-year-old guy casually choosing an image inside Photo Booth on a MacBook.

The Preset in Photo Booth

Sunset Rollercoaster did not appear out of nowhere.

Before forming Sunset Rollercoaster, Kuo Kuo had already been involved in several bands. The earliest was Acid Lips, a post-punk band from his high-school years. Later came F.L.A.T CLUB (“Fake Literary Youth Club”)⁴, Boyz & Girl, and Come on! BayBay!, which was recording an album around the same time in 2010. BayBay!’s drummer then was “Birdman” Huang Shih-wei, and one of its members was Chen Hung-li, who would later return to Sunset Rollercoaster as bassist.⁵

In 2009, Kuo Kuo formed Sunset Rollercoaster with Kevin Lee (Lee Po-hao, then a medical student at Taipei Medical University) and drummer Lo Tsun-lung. Their first show was on January 29 at Underworld on Shida Road.⁶ That grimy little bar, later erased by urban redevelopment, was a central temple gate of the 2000s Taipei indie scene.

The band name came afterward. Kuo Kuo’s version in an interview:

“MySpace needed a profile pic and I didn’t know what to photograph, so I used a preset in Apple’s Photo Booth called Sunset Rollercoaster... That’s how the Rollercoaster came about.”³

The anti-industrial nature of this origin story would later define the band’s temperament for 14 years. No brand consultant, no naming meeting, no SEO consideration. A Photo Booth default image later became the words on the backdrop of a Coachella desert stage.

📝 Curator’s note: The usual narrative of “indie going international” tends to attribute every turning point to “the band making the right strategic decision.” Sunset Rollercoaster’s story is actually the reverse: all of its key moments were uncalculated choices in the moment. The Photo Booth image was a casual pick on a dorm-room afternoon; the decision to sing entirely in English was, in Kuo Kuo’s words, because it felt “less jarring”; Coachella came because the organizers sent an invitation themselves. The Taiwanese band most heard by the world is the one that least resembles something carefully designed.

Abbey Road Mastering, Then Nothing

On September 22, 2011, Sunset Rollercoaster self-released their first album, Bossa Nova.⁷

The album title comes from bossa nova, but the music itself is closer to a mixture of lo-fi surf rock and post-punk. Recording took place at Rooftop Audio in Taipei, and the master was sent to Abbey Road Studios in London, where Steve Rooke handled it himself.⁸ A debut album made by a group of college students through DIY methods had its final stage completed in the same studio where The Beatles recorded Abbey Road.

Then the band broke up.

Fans thought this was just a small Taipei band that never took off and disappeared after one release. At the end of 2012, Kuo Kuo joined Anpu’s Algae band as guitarist, replacing the original member Shante, and toured with them for four years.⁹ Drummer Lo Tsun-lung went off to form a dark industrial side project called Fossils with Kuo Kuo. The band’s official website had no updates for four years.

“We wanted to try something else,” Kuo Kuo later told Bandcamp Daily.¹⁰

Those four years of silence became the most important contrast in the later “Coachella myth.” Sunset Rollercoaster’s story is not an inspirational template of “indie going from zero to overnight fame”; it is the story of “a group of people each doing completely different things for four years, then coming back and finally growing into their true form.”

A 1,300-Degree Myopia Notice

One afternoon in 2015, Kuo Kuo received a military draft notice.

He was originally about to begin military service, but one month before enlistment, the Ministry of National Defense sent an exemption notice. The reason was his 1,300-degree myopia. A fate that had seemed one month away from a shaved head and military uniform was overturned by an optometry report.

Kuo Kuo was 24 that year. He had just finished touring with Algae; Sunset Rollercoaster had been disbanded for four years; he had no full-time job. The stage experience accumulated over four years performing alongside Anpu, together with a circle of old friends from his alma mater’s theater scene who could play synthesizer, saxophone, and clarinet, suddenly made Kuo Kuo realize he could pull these threads in the same direction.

“I decided to really take the band seriously,” he later recalled.¹¹

On July 1, 2015, Sunset Rollercoaster played their first regrouped show at The Wall in Taipei.¹² Of the original trio (Kuo Kuo, Kevin, and Tsun-lung), only two remained. Kevin did not return, and neither did Birdman. The new members were old bandmates from Come on! BayBay!: Chen Hung-li (bass and synthesizer), Wang Shao-hsuan (keyboard), and Huang Hao-ting (saxophone). The five-person lineup added brass, synthesizers, and a funky soft-rock texture that no one in Taiwan’s indie scene had really been playing.

That year, they began working on the three songs that would become Jinji Kikko.

💡 Did you know: During Kuo Kuo’s four years as guitarist in Algae, he performed onstage with Anpu (Deserts Chang) more than 100 times. Since Sunset Rollercoaster regrouped, Anpu and Kuo Kuo still have not formally collaborated on any song. Both are among Taiwan’s most iconic indie creators and were once colleagues in the same band, but after stepping out of it they each went in entirely different directions.

Jinji Is Not Kumquat

On March 1, 2016, the _JinJi Kikko_ EP went online.¹³ Three songs: “Burgundy Red,” “My Jinji,” and “New Drug.”

The first to take off was “My Jinji.” In 2017, Spotify’s algorithm began placing the song into Discover Weekly and Indie/City Pop playlists in Indonesia and Korea. Within a year, the song had more monthly listeners in Indonesia than in Taiwan.¹⁴ NME later reported that Jakarta, Indonesia was the city with the highest number of monthly Sunset Rollercoaster listeners on Spotify worldwide.¹⁵

The band’s official-channel “My Jinji” Official Video, a visual version made later in 2020: the song had already blown up inside Spotify’s algorithm for four years before the video returned to give it a visible form for global listeners in front of screens. An afternoon languor opened by saxophone is the pair of syllables through which this band has been most heard by the world over 14 years.

The word “Jinji” made many people think of “jinju,” the Chinese word for kumquat. The band has never explained it. But according to Kuo Kuo’s interviews, the sound is actually close to “Dindi,” from the bossa nova classic of the same name, meaning “dear” or “baby” in Portuguese.¹⁶ The atmosphere of the three songs strangely echoes Antonio Carlos Jobim’s 1960s Brazilian jazz, yet it grows out of Taipei in the 2010s.

Sunset Rollercoaster live in April 2018, two years after the release of the _JinJi Kikko EP and shortly before Cassa Nova. Photo: Puramyun31, Wikimedia Commons / CC BY 2.5._

The first important overseas performance after the EP went online was SummerStage Taiwanese Waves in Central Park, New York, on July 16, 2016.¹⁷ Sunset Rollercoaster performed on the same bill as Anpu and Wonfu. It was the first time Taiwanese bands appeared as an organized slate at Central Park’s SummerStage, with all three acts on the same stage.

Then international fans began sending messages.

“I think Taipei has a relatively flat feeling. Everyone is very similar... The whole city provides a feeling that is slightly comfortable but can never break through its predicament,” Kuo Kuo once told Chiang Yi-ting of The Reporter.¹⁸ Yet this flat city, sung entirely in English, allowed listeners around the world to hear a Taipei they had assumed was flat but was in fact highly complex.

📝 Curator’s note: Why choose English? Kuo Kuo’s answer is more counterintuitive than people usually imagine. “When you’re a band that sings English songs, listeners who already listen to Western music can absorb you with the least sense of dissonance. Third, if it’s English, your customer base is the whole world.”¹⁹ This sounds more like a producer’s calm calculation of audience base than an ambitious declaration of wanting to make “international” music. Most of Taiwan’s indie scene chooses Taiwanese, Mandarin, Hakka, or Indigenous languages, with each language carrying an answer to the question “Who am I?” Sunset Rollercoaster’s answer is: I want to be heard by the whole world, and English is the largest common denominator. The honesty of this calculation cannot be filed in the same drawer as the Englishization of the K-pop industrial system.

The Five Audiotree Songs

September 26, 2018, Chicago.

Sunset Rollercoaster entered the Audiotree Live studio and recorded a five-song full session: “Greedy,” “Summum Bonum”, “New Drug,” “My Jinji,” and “I Know You Know I Love You.” It went online on October 18.²⁰ Audiotree is one of the most important in-studio session platforms in the American indie music scene, selecting a small number of bands each year to record full sessions. Sunset Rollercoaster became the first Taiwanese band to be invited.

Audiotree’s recording format is a test. A small room, very little post-production, live takes uploaded directly: every pitch slip, pause, and rhythmic drift can be seen. The aesthetic position of this format is: show me you can do this in the room; do not show me the version built from studio overdubs. What Sunset Rollercoaster delivered that day was 40 minutes of synthesizer, saxophone, bass, and drums all breathing alive in the same space. The saxophone solo in the live version of “Summum Bonum” is even looser than the studio version, and the synthesizer tone in “New Drug” carries the studio room’s own subtle reverb. After the session went online, it accumulated more than 1.1 million views,²⁰ becoming the first major gateway through which Sunset Rollercoaster’s international fanbase grew at scale.

The complete session from Audiotree’s official channel: that small Chicago studio, one autumn afternoon in 2018. Once the saxophone in “My Jinji” begins, Taiwan indie for the first time takes live form before a microphone in the American Midwest. Before this, it was data pushed into headphones by Spotify’s algorithm; from this day forward, it became people breathing in the same room.

In March of the same year, they released their second full-length album, Cassa Nova.²¹ Across nine songs, they moved completely away from the lo-fi surf rock of Bossa Nova toward disco, funk, and synthesizer-led City Pop. The whole album feels like a subtropical afternoon from 1970s Japanese artists such as Tatsuro Yamashita and Taeko Onuki, but its synth textures are coated with late-2010s vaporwave.

Throughout 2018, they played more than 100 tour dates, from Tokyo, Seoul, Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Jakarta to Los Angeles, New York, and Mexico City.²²

One of those shows was on a stage rebuilt from a shopping-mall parking lot in Jakarta, Indonesia. The crowd packed in so tightly that the stage shook, and the performance ended early. Later recorded in a long-form piece by The Reporter, this was the moment when subtropical City Pop truly detonated for a subtropical audience for the first time.²³

A side-stage shot from the same 2018 live performance. The five-person lineup added after the band’s 2015 regrouping folded brass, synthesizer, and saxophone into what had originally been a surf-rock trio structure. Photo: Puramyun31, Wikimedia Commons / CC BY 2.5.

That year, BIOS Monthly gave them a phrase: “crossing the seas to drink and compete.”²⁴ In the interview, Kuo Kuo understood his position clearly: the Mandarin-language market was too small to sustain an all-English band, so they had to go abroad to find audiences; yet the cost of overseas touring was high enough to make most indie bands hesitate. Between these two pressures, Sunset Rollercoaster developed its own path: connect as directly as possible with overseas promoters, avoid intermediation by Taiwanese management companies, keep stage setup as simple as possible, and bring only the necessary synthesizers in their luggage. The phrase “crossing the seas” was later repeatedly cited in Asia’s indie scene to describe how a band turned “having no industrial backing” into a functioning business model. Geographic movement was only the surface; the true core was a redefinition of commercial rhythm.

The Sonora Stage in the Desert

On July 27, 2019, they appeared on the Red Marquee stage at Japan’s Fuji Rock Festival.²⁵ It is one of Asia’s largest rock festivals, and Red Marquee is its second-largest stage.

On October 30, 2020, they released their third album, Soft Storm.²⁶ During a 2019 tour in Los Angeles, Kuo Kuo unexpectedly met an idol he had admired since his youth: Ned Doheny, the 1970s American session musician who had written songs for Eagles and Linda Ronstadt. Kuo Kuo invited Ned on the spot to fly to Taipei and collaborate. Ned really came, and wrote “Overlove” with Sunset Rollercoaster. Then COVID-19 broke out, cutting off the planned follow-up recording in Los Angeles.²⁷

After Soft Storm went online, NME ranked it fourth among the best Asian albums of 2020. Daniel Peters wrote:

“It's a left-turn by a band fully confident in their strengths, looking inward to focus on craft and instinct.”²⁸

(A left turn made by a band already fully confident in its strengths, turning its gaze inward to focus on craft and instinct.)

On August 21, 2021, they won Best Band at the 32nd Golden Melody Awards for Soft Storm. The jury’s citation read: “They broke through the aesthetic barriers of Mandopop; not only are they technically mature, they have also influenced many young bands. They are international and future-facing.”²⁹

Two years later, on January 11, 2023, Coachella announced its full 2023 lineup. Sunset Rollercoaster’s name appeared on the Sonora stage. The headline of Blow StreetVoice’s report that day read:

“For the first time in more than two decades of Coachella, a Taiwanese band has been invited onto a major stage.”³⁰

On April 15, 2023, at 7:55 p.m. Pacific Daylight Time, at the Empire Polo Club in Indio, California, Sunset Rollercoaster took the Sonora stage.³¹ Their nine-song setlist opened with Shostakovich’s Waltz No. 2, a tribute to Eyes Wide Shut, then moved through “Vanilla Villa,” “Burgundy Red,” “My Jinji,” “Summum Bonum,” “Jellyfish”, “I’m a Fish,” and closed with “Candlelight.”

The band’s official-channel “Vanilla Villa” Official Video, the lead track from the 2019 EP of the same name and the first song after the Shostakovich overture on Coachella 2023’s Sonora stage. The music video carries the surface texture of a 1970s Japanese science-fiction film, but the narrative is “an alien falls in love with a human.” The same album was chosen by _NME as Asia’s fourth-best album of 2020; three years later, five thousand listeners in the California desert were nodding along to it._

“Hello, we are Sunset Rollercoaster from Taiwan. We are very happy to be here with everyone tonight,” Kuo Kuo said in his opening greeting.³²

The Sonora stage is one of Coachella’s smaller indoor stages, with a capacity of about 5,000, but that day the audience spilled outside the tent. Most European and American fans belonged to the generation that had discovered “My Jinji” through Spotify Discover Weekly. For the first time, they had the chance to see that the people who sang this song were Asian, and specifically Taiwanese, not Japanese or Korean. A few audience members held up black T-shirts printed with the words SUNSET ROLLERCOASTER, and several Taiwanese students drove across state lines to see the performance. Taipei guidebooks, a California desert, subtropical City Pop: three lines that should not have intersected folded into a single afternoon inside the Sonora tent.

One week later, on April 22, the second Coachella weekend, they returned to the Sonora stage for a 10-song set.³³

“I feel like at the moment there isn’t a band in Taiwan that worships foreign things as much as we do, that wants to gain recognition from the world this much, so I also thought I’d just see how far we can go,” Kuo Kuo said in an interview with VERSE.³⁴

⚠️ Contested view: The claim that Sunset Rollercoaster was “the first Taiwanese band at Coachella in 33 years” spread in 2023 after some Chinese-language media copied Taiwan News, but it is logically impossible: Coachella began in 1999, so by 2023 it had existed for only 24 years. Blow StreetVoice’s wording, “the first invited in more than two decades,” is the accurate description. This kind of distortion, in which “astonishing numbers” are amplified as they circulate, is a typical pattern that emerged after a Taiwanese band became visible at large scale in the English-speaking world for the first time: pride overtook fact-checking.

Becoming Their Own Light

In 2017, the Korean band Hyukoh came to Taipei on tour for the first time. Backstage, vocalist Oh Hyuk was recommended by The Black Skirts to go watch Sunset Rollercoaster’s performance. Oh Hyuk was starstruck after seeing them, and Kuo Kuo also recognized him. The two frontmen added each other on Instagram, and Kuo Kuo took Oh Hyuk around Taipei.³⁵

Three years later, on October 5, 2020, Sunset Rollercoaster quietly released a single called “Candlelight,” featuring OHHYUK.³⁶ In a song just over four minutes long, Kuo Kuo’s saxophone leaves a space halfway through, allowing Oh Hyuk to continue the second half in Korean. No press conference, no announcement of a cross-border collaboration: just two frontmen placing each other’s voice inside their own song three years after adding each other on Instagram. “Candlelight” later became the closing song of Sunset Rollercoaster’s Coachella 2023 Sonora setlist. Something written through Instagram DMs three years earlier became, three years later, the final song that five thousand people heard together in the desert.

The band’s official-channel “Candlelight feat. OHHYUK” Official Video, released on October 5, 2020. The version in which Oh Hyuk takes over the second half of Sunset Rollercoaster’s song in Korean was the first seed of the full album _AAA, four years before the official 2024 collaborative album._

Over the next four years, that seed slowly grew into a complete album. From 2023 to 2024, Kuo Kuo and Oh Hyuk met every month, taking turns between Gapyeong, Seoul, and Jeju Island to write songs. In one year, they wrote eight songs. No management company arranged meetings, no memorandum of collaboration, no preset single schedule. The two frontmen worked like singers from the 1970s: living for a week at a time in each other’s city studios, setting out instruments, drinking, talking about the previous night’s dreams, and then writing a song. Kuo Kuo later described that year in an interview with Interview Magazine: “We are both very lazy, lazy enough that it was just right for doing this, because being too diligent would have ruined it.” This anti-industrial rhythm of collaboration is almost a violation of the laws of physics within the industrial systems of K-pop and Mandopop.

On July 10, 2024, AAA was released as a collaborative album by Sunset Rollercoaster and Hyukoh.³⁷ Eight songs: “Kite War,” “Y,” “Antenna,” “Glue,” “Young Man,” “Do Nothing,” “Aaaannnnteeeeennnaaaaaa,” and “2F Young Man.” The album follows none of the established formulas for “cross-border collaboration”: no Taiwan-Korea duet, no bilingual stitching. Instead, two Asian indie bands build a bridge between City Pop and alt-rock that had not previously existed.

HYUKOH’s official-channel “Antenna” Official MV, one of the eight songs on _AAA. The two frontmen from Taipei and Seoul pass their respective vocal lines back and forth in the same song. Korean and English do not form a duet and are not translated through subtitles; they simply take turns entering. That arrangement decision itself is the most direct demonstration that “Asian indie can stand on its own without translating itself for Europe and America.”_

Chien Miao-ju wrote a line in 2018 for Opinion@UDN that now describes AAA even more precisely: “It has ruminated on a large amount of influence from British and American rock... both retro-romantic and avant-garde-trendy. The gentle, flowing vocal style still feels very Asian.”³⁸

On June 28, 2025, the 36th Golden Melody Awards ceremony was held at Taipei Arena. AAA received nine nominations, including Song of the Year, Best Band, Best Album Producer, Best Vocal Recording Album, and Best Music Video. It ultimately won three: Best Music Video, Best Vocal Recording Album, and Best Album Packaging Design.³⁹ Sending a cross-border band project into the central mechanisms of Taiwan’s most authoritative Mandopop music awards, and having it recognized in major categories such as Best Album and Best Producer, marked the first time since the Golden Melody Awards began in 1990 that a collaborative album by a “half-Korean band” reached this level of nomination.

After Sunset Rollercoaster’s Coachella performance, a VERSE reporter asked Kuo Kuo a question: Did he now consider himself a “light of Taiwan”?

“I don’t want to take on the title of light of Taiwan. As long as you do your own work well and become your own light, that is the best thing.”⁴⁰

On August 8, 2025, they unexpectedly released their fifth full-length album, QUIT QUIETLY 悄悄消消.⁴¹ Across 11 songs, it gathered five years of accumulation since Soft Storm, with cross-disciplinary collaborations including Oh Hyuk, Leah Dou, Bulareyaung Dance Company, and Yuma Abe of Never Young Beach.

✦ No one in that small bar on Shida Road in Taipei in 2010 would have predicted that the Photo Booth preset on that Mac, with its silhouette of a roller coaster and a sunset, would 14 years later become the words on the backdrop of a Coachella desert stage. Nor would anyone have predicted, on the afternoon in 2015 when Kuo Kuo received his military exemption notice, that a guy who nearly could not become a soldier because of 1,300-degree myopia would end up singing Taipei’s humid afternoons entirely in English and placing the way an island is most heard by the world into two syllables: JinJi.

Singing Taipei’s sunset entirely in English, paradoxically, made Taiwan more audible to the world than ever.

That light shone from a casually selected Photo Booth background image all the way onto a desert stage.

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Further Reading:

• Taiwan Indie Music — The developmental axis of Taiwan indie music, from Crystal Records in the 1980s to Sunset Rollercoaster, No Party for Cao Dong, and Collage in the 2020s
• Taiwan Music Festival Culture — The changing scenes of Taiwan’s music festivals, from Spring Scream and Megaport Festival to Hohaiyan Rock Festival
• Taiwan Pop Music — A history of Taiwan pop music, from the 1970s campus folk movement to the streaming era of the 2020s
• Taiwan’s Music Industry and the Streaming Era — How Taiwanese bands reach global audiences in the age of Spotify algorithms
• Deserts Chang and Anpu — Kuo Kuo’s onstage partnership during his time as guitarist in Algae from 2012 to 2016

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Image Sources

• Hero and inline images throughout: Three photos of Sunset Rollercoaster performing live on April 6, 2018, by Puramyun31 (Wikimedia Commons), licensed under CC BY 2.5 Generic: (1).jpg, (5).jpg, and (8).jpg. All three were taken at the same show (with a Fujifilm X100F), documenting the texture of Sunset Rollercoaster’s Taiwan performance just before their 2018 world tour began.

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References

1. “My Jinji” official Spotify track page — A track from Sunset Rollercoaster’s 2016 EP JINJI KIKKO. As of January 2025, it had surpassed 100 million cumulative streams on Spotify, one of the historic streaming records for a single by a Taiwanese indie band.↩
2. “Sunset Rollercoaster becomes the first Taiwanese band invited onto a major Coachella stage” — Report by Blow Music (StreetVoice), January 11, 2023. After Coachella announced its full 2023 lineup in January, StreetVoice published the first Chinese-language report; its original headline used “in more than two decades” to describe the band’s historical position, rather than the erroneous “33 years” figure that later spread from Taiwan News.↩
3. Kuo Kuo interview, part two — Published by the blog The Funk Soul Spectre on September 14, 2018. Kuo Kuo personally explains that the band name Sunset Rollercoaster came from the Mac Photo Booth preset “Sunset Rollercoaster” background image used during MySpace registration. This is the most direct first-hand source for the band-name origin.↩
4. F.L.A.T CLUB StreetVoice band page — One of the post-punk bands Kuo Kuo participated in from high school into university, part of his musical experience before Sunset Rollercoaster was formed.↩
5. “Come on! BayBay! Ten-Year Interview” — Published by POLYSH magazine on September 4, 2016. Mentions that Chen Hung-li, who later joined Sunset Rollercoaster as bassist, and Kuo Kuo were already former bandmates in Come on! BayBay! before Sunset Rollercoaster was formed; Birdman (Huang Shih-wei) was also a member of that band.↩
6. Underworld 2009 performance record — The earliest verifiable Sunset Rollercoaster performance record appears on January 29, 2009, at Underworld on Shida Road. This livehouse was one of the core venues of the 2000s Taipei indie scene and closed in 2013 because of urban redevelopment.↩
7. Bossa Nova official Bandcamp album page — Sunset Rollercoaster’s self-released debut album from September 22, 2011. Its style at the time leaned toward lo-fi surf rock, clearly differing from the City Pop style that emerged after the band regrouped in 2015.↩
8. VERSE, “A Soft Storm from Taiwan” — A VERSE magazine profile of Sunset Rollercoaster, with detailed records of the debut album master being sent to Abbey Road Studios in London and handled by Steve Rooke.↩
9. Anpu (Deserts Chang) Wikipedia — Algae band members — Kuo Kuo joined Anpu’s backing band Algae at the end of 2012 as guitarist, replacing the original member Shante. He remained until early 2016, after Deserts Chang announced the end of her farewell tour.↩
10. Sunset Rollercoaster interview in Bandcamp Daily — Interview by Isabela Raygoza, published in Bandcamp Daily on August 10, 2016. Kuo Kuo mentions the dark industrial side project Fossils that he worked on with drummer Lo Tsun-lung during the band’s hiatus, and explains that “we wanted to try something else” was the reason for disbanding.↩
11. “Sunset Rollercoaster’s Kuo Kuo: Ten Years of Scenery” — Published by 500 Times magazine (United Daily News) in 2021. In the interview, Kuo Kuo recalls the moment in 2015 when, after receiving a military exemption notice because of 1,300-degree myopia, he decided to seriously treat the band as a career.↩
12. martonmart 2015 The Wall live write-up — A personal blog record of Sunset Rollercoaster’s regrouping debut at The Wall in Taipei on July 1, 2015.↩
13. JINJI KIKKO official Bandcamp EP page — Sunset Rollercoaster’s first EP after regrouping, released on March 1, 2016. It includes “Burgundy Red,” “My Jinji,” and “New Drug,” and marks the starting point of the band’s City Pop style.↩
14. “The Taiwanese Wanderers Sweeping Asia” — Written by Chiang Yi-ting and published by The Reporter on June 6, 2019. Provides a detailed record of the spread of Sunset Rollercoaster’s audience in Indonesia, Korea, and Southeast Asia from 2017 to 2019, including the Jakarta shopping-mall stage that shook under the force of the crowd.↩
15. Same as [^14]: According to The Reporter’s citation of a 2019 NME report, Jakarta, Indonesia was then the city with the highest number of monthly Spotify listeners for Sunset Rollercoaster, an indicator that “subtropical City Pop” had truly taken off among subtropical audiences.↩
16. Marie Claire Taiwan, “The Taiwanese band Sunset Rollercoaster that became popular overseas” — This interview includes a clarification of the origin of “Jinji,” connecting it to Antonio Carlos Jobim’s bossa nova classic “Dindi” in Portuguese, meaning “dear,” rather than the Chinese word for kumquat.↩
17. SummerStage Taiwanese Waves 2016 event page — Central Park SummerStage event on July 16, 2016, part of the Ministry of Culture-supported Taiwanese Waves series, with Sunset Rollercoaster performing alongside Anpu and Wonfu.↩
18. Same as [^14]: In The Reporter’s 2019 interview, Kuo Kuo’s description of Taipei’s temperament as “relatively flat... slightly comfortable, but never able to break through its predicament” is the most important first-person quote for understanding Sunset Rollercoaster’s sense of the city.↩
19. Same as [^3]: Kuo Kuo’s original answer to “why choose English” in the interview: “When you’re a band that sings English songs, listeners who already listen to Western music can absorb you with the least sense of dissonance. Third, if it’s English, your customer base is the whole world.”↩
20. Sunset Rollercoaster on Audiotree Live YouTube — Full-session video of Sunset Rollercoaster recorded on September 26, 2018, in the Chicago Audiotree studio, including five complete songs and released on October 18. They were the first Taiwanese band invited by Audiotree. As of May 2026, the session had accumulated more than 1.1 million views.↩
21. Cassa Nova 半熟王子 official Bandcamp album page — The band’s second full-length album, released on March 14, 2018, by the band’s own label, Sunset Music Productions. Across nine songs, its style moved completely from lo-fi surf rock to City Pop / disco / funk.↩
22. “The rise of YouTube... Sunset Rollercoaster’s international touring” — Written by Chen Li-yen and published by Mirror Media on May 29, 2020. Details Sunset Rollercoaster’s more than 100 world-tour dates throughout 2018, including China, Japan, Korea, Southeast Asia, the United States, Europe, and Mexico.↩
23. Same as [^14]: The Reporter’s 2019 article records in detail Sunset Rollercoaster’s show on a stage rebuilt from a shopping-mall parking lot in Jakarta, Indonesia, where the performance ended early because the crowd’s intensity caused the stage to shake.↩
24. “Crossing the Seas to Drink and Compete” — An interview in the online magazine BIOS Monthly. It examines structural questions in Taiwanese indie bands’ overseas development from the perspectives of international touring costs and the Mandarin-language market.↩
25. Fuji Rock ’19 Sunset Rollercoaster event page — July 27, 2019, performance on the Red Marquee stage. Sunset Rollercoaster was the first Taiwanese band to appear on one of the major stages at Japan’s Fuji Rock Festival.↩
26. Soft Storm 柔性風暴 official Bandcamp album page — The band’s third full-length album, released on October 30, 2020, including the song “Overlove,” a collaboration with American musician Ned Doheny.↩
27. Same as [^8]: VERSE magazine records in detail Kuo Kuo’s story of unexpectedly meeting his idol Ned Doheny, the 1970s American session musician who wrote for Eagles and Linda Ronstadt, during a 2019 LA tour and inviting him to come to Taipei to collaborate.↩
28. NME, “25 Best Asian Albums of 2020” — Written by Daniel Peters for NME Asia’s 2020 year-end list. NME ranked Soft Storm fourth among the best Asian albums of 2020, with commentary emphasizing the band’s inward turn from a position of confidence in its own style.↩
29. “2021 Golden Melody Awards Best Band: Sunset Rollercoaster” — Report by The News Lens on August 21, 2021. Records verbatim the 32nd Golden Melody Awards jury’s citation for Sunset Rollercoaster’s Best Band award.↩
30. Same as [^2]: Blow StreetVoice’s January 11, 2023, report on the Coachella announcement, whose original text used “the first invited in more than two decades” to describe the band’s historical position.↩
31. Coachella 2023 Week 1 setlist — A record from the crowd-edited database setlist.fm. Complete nine-song record of Sunset Rollercoaster’s Sonora stage set at the Empire Polo Club in Indio, California, from 19:55 to 20:40 Pacific Daylight Time on April 15, 2023.↩
32. VERSE, “Sunset Rollercoaster after Coachella: Becoming Their Own Light” — Includes the Coachella opening greeting, “Hello, we are Sunset Rollercoaster from Taiwan. We are very happy to be here with everyone tonight,” and subsequent interview material verbatim.↩
33. Coachella 2023 Week 2 setlist — A record from the crowd-edited database setlist.fm. Complete 10-song record of the second-weekend Sonora stage set on April 22, 2023, with the final two songs being “In My Head” and “I Know You Know I Love You.”↩
34. Same as [^32]: In the post-Coachella interview with VERSE, Kuo Kuo described his ambition: “I feel like at the moment there isn’t a band in Taiwan that worships foreign things as much as we do, that wants to gain recognition from the world this much.”↩
35. NME, “HYUKOH × Sunset Rollercoaster AAA interview” — The origin story of Oh Hyuk and Kuo Kuo’s first meeting: during Hyukoh’s first Taipei tour in 2017, The Black Skirts recommended backstage that Oh Hyuk go see Sunset Rollercoaster.↩
36. “Candlelight feat. OHHYUK” Official Video on the band’s official channel — Sunset Rollercoaster’s single released on October 5, 2020, for which vocalist Kuo Kuo invited Oh Hyuk, vocalist of the Korean band Hyukoh, to feature across the sea. It was the first seed of the full 2024 collaborative album AAA. The song was later included on the band’s third full-length album, Soft Storm, released on October 30, 2020, and became the closing song of their 2023 Coachella Sonora stage setlist.↩
37. AAA official Bandcamp album page — The July 10, 2024, collaborative album by Sunset Rollercoaster and the Korean band Hyukoh. Its eight songs were co-released by Sunset Music Productions and the Korean side’s Doolset.↩
38. “Ten Years of Maturation: New Music from Subtropical Taiwan (Part 1)” — Written by Chien Miao-ju and published by Opinion@UDN on May 24, 2018. This early review described Sunset Rollercoaster’s style as “ruminating on a large amount of influence from British and American rock... both retro-romantic and avant-garde-trendy. The gentle, flowing vocal style still feels very Asian.”↩
39. “AAA receives nine nominations at the 36th Golden Melody Awards and wins three” — Report by The News Lens on June 28, 2025. Records Sunset Rollercoaster’s AAA receiving nine nominations and winning three awards, Best Music Video, Best Vocal Recording Album, and Best Album Packaging Design, at the 36th Golden Melody Awards ceremony held at Taipei Arena on June 28, 2025.↩
40. Same as [^32]: Kuo Kuo’s response in the post-Coachella interview with VERSE to the title “light of Taiwan”: “I don’t want to take on the title of light of Taiwan. As long as you do your own work well and become your own light.”↩
41. QUIT QUIETLY 悄悄消消 purchase page on the band’s official website — The band’s fifth full-length album, unexpectedly released on August 8, 2025. It includes 11 songs, with cross-disciplinary collaborators including Oh Hyuk, Leah Dou, Bulareyaung Dance Company, and Yuma Abe of Never Young Beach.↩