B-Side Guys

Geography becomes biography when home transforms beneath your feet. On “FAITH,” NYC-based artist Vic Atlas (the musical persona of Hong Kong-born Lillian Stowe) maps the psychological territory of watching one’s homeland undergo political metamorphosis, creating an urgent dispatch from the intersection of personal identity and political reality.

The track’s thirteen-second ambient introduction—where “again” repeats like a maddening loop—establishes both the cyclical nature of authoritarianism and the existential exhaustion of witnessing history’s darker patterns reemerge. This sonic prelude serves as perfect entry point to a composition that defies neat categorization, blending elements of EDM, hip-hop, R&B, and soul into something distinctly contemporary yet historically informed.

Atlas’s opening lines establish immediate physical and emotional coordinates: “I’ve been running to the rhythm of the streets these days/If I hit the ground hard enough I’ll find some sense of place.” This imagery of desperate connection to solid ground creates powerful contrast with the unstable political reality described later. When she continues, “A city on the fault line up in flames,” the geopolitical reality of Hong Kong emerges without explicit naming—a place where tectonic shifts in governance have created irreversible rupture.

The chorus’s seemingly simple request—”I could use a little more faith”—gains profound resonance through repetition, transforming from personal yearning into collective necessity. This complexity deepens in the second verse with the stark acknowledgment: “The place I was born will never be the same.” Here, Atlas captures the particular grief of political displacement—mourning not just personal memory but collective possibility.

Most arresting is the bridge section, where the tempo accelerates to mirror surveillance acceleration: “When the rhythm hits the streets/And you’re speaking with your teeth/Hold your cell they brought the machines.” These images of technological monitoring create claustrophobic urgency, while questions about “believing what we wanna see” and “forswearing our sisters’ reality” explore the cognitive dissonance created by authoritarian information control.

What elevates “FAITH” beyond mere political commentary is Atlas’s commitment to emotional truth alongside factual reality. The track’s fusion of futuristic production with traditional soul elements mirrors Hong Kong’s historical position between East and West, tradition and innovation—all while capturing the universal human experience of seeking solid ground when political realities shift beneath our feet.