Toronto-based, Hong Kong-born songwriter Tennyson King shares “The Great Unknown,” the latest single from his forthcoming album 100 Cities 百城 (out November 6th), a driving and uplifting folk-rock song inspired by a near-death experience while freediving off the east coast of Australia. Blending the wild energy of Western folk-rock with traditional Chinese instrumentation, the track turns a frightening encounter with the ocean into a larger meditation on surrender, mortality and learning to embrace the parts of life we simply cannot control.

The inspiration came while Tennyson was freediving and snorkeling near Australia’s Sunshine Coast, where he found himself caught in a current and nearly drowned. The experience eventually became a metaphor for the moments in life when fighting against forces beyond our control only leaves us more exhausted. Rather than continuing to swim against the current, sometimes the only choice is to lean back, catch your breath and allow yourself to be carried somewhere unexpected.

“The experience became a metaphor for something much larger: the realization that sometimes, no matter how hard we fight, we simply cannot control the current carrying us,” Tennyson explains. “We can exhaust ourselves trying to swim against it, or we can lean back, catch our breath, and surrender to where it takes us.”

For Tennyson, “The Great Unknown” encompasses everything from the unpredictable variables shaping our everyday lives to the vastness of the universe and the ultimate uncertainty of what happens after death. Rather than allowing those questions to become paralyzing, the song asks what might happen if we approached the unknown with curiosity instead of fear.

That sense of adventure mirrors the broader spirit of 100 Cities 百城, an album rooted in cultural reclamation, movement, and Tennyson’s rediscovery of his Chinese identity. While songs across the record explore ancestry, relationships, travel, and belonging, “The Great Unknown” confronts the uncertainty beneath all of those journeys, finding liberation in accepting that we cannot always know where they will lead.

Musically, “The Great Unknown” pushes further into the folk-rock side of Tennyson’s fusion of Western and traditional Chinese music. Much of what initially sounds like electric guitar is actually the zhongruan 中阮, with Tennyson running the four-string Chinese instrument through distortion pedals and approaching it with a gritty, rock ‘n’ roll playing style. Rather than positioning traditional instrumentation delicately around a Western arrangement, the zhongruan becomes one of the song’s driving forces.

The guzheng adds another unexpected dimension, bending and sliding through the chorus in a way that evokes the expressive movement of an electric guitar while keeping the song rooted in its Chinese musical identity. Co-written in Toronto with Rebekah Hawker and longtime collaborator Dan Hosh between Tennyson’s tours, “The Great Unknown” emerged after the three began swapping stories about their recent experiences and travels. When Tennyson recounted nearly drowning in Australia, the conversation naturally expanded into ideas of life, death, surrender and what it means to live in the face of uncertainty.