“Honestly, I’ve built what I feel is a kingdom of peerless beauty from a super-dark source of creative inspiration,” Hui-Ting Chen tells Apple Music, describing the concept behind 王國Darktopia, the fourth album from her solo project the Huiting 陳惠婷. “One interesting thing is that many of the songs were inspired by especially dark films or TV series. Even series as dark as American Horror Story or set in an apocalyptic world like The Last of Us could serve as blueprints for my love songs. That’s why I find the concept and album title particularly apt.” Taking the galactic futurism of 2017’s Voyager 3 in a more ominous direction, Chen locates moments of hope in end-of-days love stories, devilish bargains and the bleak loneliness of crowds. Breaking with the electronic image she established on earlier albums, Chen foregrounds a rock sound, from the guitar-driven pulse of ironic opener “美好人生” [“My Wonderful Life”] to the punk leanings of “派對終結者” [“Party Crasher”]—as well as dance-rock and blues. Although Chen has long drawn a distinction between her solo efforts and her collaborative work as keyboardist and lead vocalist for indie rock group Tizzy Bac, here she gives her creative impulses free rein. “The guiding creative principle here is that everything should be as it should,” she says. “In other words, I no longer hold rigidly to a musical genre or artist image—there’s rock when the occasion demands, or piano poetry, or electronica, or blues, or alternative or pop. Every song is exactly how it needs to be. All those disparate styles are what I’m aiming to include under the banner of 'the Huiting’.” Some of the bleakness of Darktopia is due to the fact that as a solo album, it could be more personal than Chen’s work with Tizzy Bac. “Sometimes I even feel like a band has free will of its own, independent of its members,” she says. “Even as a songwriter and lead singer in the group, sometimes I need to consider the band’s will rather than what I want. But for solo work I get to write using my own identity. Even if I don’t draw a deliberate distinction, most pieces in the comparatively rigid structure of a band tackle larger issues or make a show of aggression or power. As an individual, I can fully express the more personal part of my own world—its darker, more obsessive aesthetics.” Chen worked with a host of collaborators to realise her expansive vision. “Lots of instrumentals were just modelled or imagined during the demo stage, so getting to hear those arrangements actually take shape felt like a dream becoming reality. It was enough to bring tears to your eyes,” she says. “You felt like it was perfect—how all those musical worlds and scenes you sketched and imagined were actually present before your eyes.” Asked for her recommendations, Chen draws listeners’ attention to two tracks in particular. “‘Love Me the Way I Want You To’ is my first blues song in 20 years of writing. It fulfils a wish and also adds a missing puzzle piece to my creative output,” she says. Then second is “誰も傷付けたくないスポンジ” [“The Sponge”], a Japanese-language track: “I studied the language for a few years so of course I wanted to see what it felt like to write a song in Japanese. Thanks to editorial supervision from Yuka Aoki and vocal direction from Eric Chen, I’d say it’s a pretty decent Japanese song. I’m recommending it because it satisfies my own creative impulses—songwriters can be selfish, after all…”