A. Wesley Chung is officially back, and this time he’s brought sunshine. The American-born, Glasgow-based singer-songwriter debuts his new single “Sunshine (You Know You Should)” as a belted and blissful blast of restorative, boundary-blurring songcraft, where emotional clarity is twice the cut.
Life pulses through “Sunshine (You Know You Should)” from its first seconds. Built around a disco-adjacent beat and enlivened with warm gospel piano tones, the track surges like a diffident, sea-steeped beast, forward and backward at once, with the organic flow of it all proving almost impossible to resist. It’s a tune that sounds at once familiar and newfound, as though it were an old vinyl, long lost and then spun on a new turntable. What makes “Sunshine (You Know You Should)” so deeply affecting is its profound why. It’s not, after all, feel-good music for the sake of it. It’s music that acknowledges struggle and gently, insistently hopes. Chung’s lyrics provide a quietly resilient counterweight, neither hectoring nor hapless, but always rooted. Keep your head up, and you’ll see the good. In a time of hyper-stimulation and half-hearted platitudes, that level of honesty hits. The song pulses with the warmth of collaboration. L.A. vocalist Rachel Gonzalez contributes warm, soulful harmonies that push the chorus upward toward something communal, less a performance and more a shared affirmation. It is a beautiful call-and-response that evokes the gospel roots encoded in the track’s DNA. And speaking of roots, Chung’s father, a former gospel choir co-leader in Long Beach, Calif., recorded the piano. The multigenerational texture alone adds a heartwarmingness that is hard to fake and impossible to ignore.
Genre-wise, Chung refuses to be easily classified. “Sunshine (You Know You Should)” swoops from indie folk intimacies through gospel deepness and danceable pop buoyancy with the ease of an artist who has lived every sound you hear here. But like, at its heart, it’s a song about trying to keep your head above water, while helping other people to do the same.