The xx’s Oliver Sim announces debut solo album, Hideous Bastard

completemusicupdate.com:

Oliver Sim of The xx has announced that he will release his debut album later this year. It’s called ‘Hideous Bastard’ and is apparently inspired by a concoction of Sim’s own life and his love of horror movies.Its first single is ‘Hideous’, featuring Jimmy Somerville, and comes with a video directed by Yann Gonzalez, with whom Sim has also collaborated on a short horror film that premiered at the Cannes Film Festival on Sunday.“Early on in the making of my record, ‘Hideous Bastard’, I realised that I was writing a lot about fear and shame”, says Sim. “I imagine that might paint a picture of a dark, ‘woe is me’ sounding album, but in recent years I’ve become a firm believer that the best antidote to these feelings can be bringing them to the surface and shedding some light on them”.“I haven’t written the record to dwell, but rather to free myself of some of the shame and fear that I’ve felt for a long time”, he adds. “So, I hear a lot of the music as joyous, because the experience of writing and recording it has been the complete opposite of what fear and shame have been for me”.Moving on to the first single, he goes on: “Two thirds in, having a good idea of what the record was about, I realised I’d been circling around one of the things that has probably caused me the most fear and shame.

My HIV status. I’ve been living with HIV since I was seventeen and it’s played with how I’ve felt towards myself, and how I’ve assumed others have felt towards me, from that age and into my adult life.

So, quite impulsively, I wrote about it on a song called ‘Hideous’”.“I thought I could release it into the world and be done with it”, he continues. “After playing the song to my mum, being the protective and wise mum that she is, she.