OLIVER SIM
Shares debut album Hideous Bastard
Out now via Young
Oliver Sim — best known for his work as songwriter, bassist and vocalist of The xx — unveils his debut album Hideous Bastard today alongside focus track ‘Run The Credits’ via Young. The much-anticipated album, produced by Oliver’s bandmate and lifelong friend Jamie xx, is a collection of songs inspired by Oliver’s love of horror movies and his own life experience and was conceived in Australia when Sim followed Jaime xx to Sydney on tour.
“I’m ugly.” The first words you hear. First track, first question. “Am I hideous?” Sim introduces his themes: fear, shame, loneliness, secrets, masks. A sonic storm brews, an angelic voice cuts through. “Be brave, have trust, just be willing to be loved.” Sim counters with his coup de grace. “Been living with HIV since 17, am I hideous?”
The revelation stalks his record, as it has shadowed his life. In that first track, ‘Hideous’, Sim wonders if honesty will set him free. The hope and the tension are reflected in the twisted musical environment he’s created with Jamie, full of surreal little sounds that escape into the ether, breaking free.
“I very much see this album as a queer horror film, and I wrote ‘Run the Credits’ as the closing scenes of the film,” says Sim of the focus track. “Sonically, I think it’s quite a joyous and celebratory song, but lyrically it’s quite open ended and has a lot of anger. It was also an opportunity to pay homage to some of the characters I love the most in cinema like Patrick Bateman and Buffalo Bill. I’ve loved those characters since I was a little boy. I never identified with the Disney princes or the action heroes — the villains and the final girls are the ones who excited me and who I aspired to be.”
Sim has shared several tracks from the album already: ‘Romance with a Memory,’ ‘Fruit,’ ‘GMT’ and ‘Hideous,’ a song that features lifelong hero Jimmy Somerville on guest vocals. Music from the album will also soundtrack the forthcoming queer horror short film Hideous, starring Sim and directed by Yann Gonzalez, which made its world premiere as part of the Semaine de la Critique at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.” Ambitious, provocative, revealing (and at times very funny) in equal measures, it’s a pitch-perfect visual accompaniment to the album.
Traditional horror doesn’t frighten Sim. “If I want to be scared, it will be something with no resolution,” he insists. Revelatory, then, that for all his questions, he couldn’t reach a resolution with his record. Hideous with its paralyzing self-doubt. Never Here… “I was never really here.” Run the Credits… “Even Romeo dies in the final reel.”
“I finished the tracklist and there is no bow at the end,” says Sim, conceding a naturally nihilistic bent. “There is no resolution. There are tons of open-ended questions that I suppose are only answered by me existing and putting out the music. I had a real wobble in the middle of making the album when I wondered if I was perpetuating this idea of the self-loathing homosexual. That’s not what I am trying to do. When I’m at my most self-loathing, the last thing I’m doing is talking about it. The fact that I’m writing about these things and putting them out into the world is the opposite of shame to me.”
So maybe it’s an exorcism?
“It’s definitely an exorcism, bringing out all of these qualities that I thought have made me a monster, showing them to the world, and maybe realizing they’re not so monstrous. I mean, if I’m keeping them in, it’s just like a breeding ground for more monstrous things.”
Purchase / Download Oliver Sim – Hideous Bastard: https://oliversim.ffm.to/hideous
Oliver Sim – Hideous Bastard
1. Hideous
2. Romance with a Memory
3. Sensitive Child
4. Never Here
5. Unreliable Narrator
6. Saccharine
7. Confident Man
8. GMT
9. Fruit
10. Run The Credits
