Few indie musicians have made the kind of impact on pop music that Oliver Sim has. With the xx, the band he founded as a teenager with Romy Madley Croft and Jamie xx, Sim has won a Mercury prize, topped the UK album charts twice and played on some of the biggest stages in the world. Meanwhile, the xx’s distinctive, minimalist take on R&B and indie-pop was infiltrating the mainstream: by the mid-2010s, you could hear fragments of their musical DNA in songs by Rihanna, Beyoncé and Drake.
In September, Sim becomes the last member of the band to step out as a solo artist with Hideous Bastard, an album of ragged, off-kilter pop and post-punk that explores queerness, masculinity and shame. Featuring vocals from Bronski Beat’s Jimmy Somerville on opener Hideous – which deals with Sim’s HIV diagnosis at 17 – and production from Jamie xx throughout, it’s an album that, refreshingly, elides the empowerment/self-hatred binary that many pop records from LGBTQ+ artists seem pressured to fit into.
