Their correspondence led to the film “Hideous,” a pastiche of early silent film, 1960s British television, 1970s glam rock and 1980s gay pornography. “I confessed to him that the first time I met one of my ex-boyfriends, we were exchanging music from the xx,” Gonzalez said in a video interview. The film, which is set entirely to tracks from Sim’s album, was directed by Yann Gonzalez, another gay artist Sim reached out to during the pandemic. Many of his friends and family were aware of that fact, but this is the first time he’s chosen to discuss his status in public. “Hideous,” a mid-tempo pop song with moody and lush orchestration, opens the album, and its final verse packs a wallop: “Been living with H.I.V. Something darker lurked beneath his blue-and-white-striped button-down: a T-shirt emblazoned with “Buffalo Bill’s Body Lotion,” an allusion to the serial killer in the film “The Silence of the Lambs.” On an April afternoon, he sported baggy khakis and a fresh tan courtesy of a weekend watching his bandmate Jamie xx at Coachella. He is tall and slim, with gigantic amber-colored eyes that he says turn a bit green when he cries.
Oliver Sim is far from ugly in any conventional sense of the word. “To me, starting a song with ‘I’m ugly’ is hilarious.” “A lot of the sense of humor is very British,” he said. Sim’s vocals on “Hideous Bastard” are flinty and melismatic.
