Siem Reap
No one was really waiting for Gilles Demolder to make a solo record. After all, he had already built a name for himself in Oathbreaker and Wiegedood, two of Belgium’s heaviest and most revered underground exports. But after Oathbreaker dissolved—along with the relationship that had fueled its last stretch—Demolder wasn’t left with much except a laptop, a couple of cheap microphones and started writing songs that didn’t fit anywhere else.
The result was Siem Reap and its self-recorded 2023 debut, Now What?. Lo-fi, confessional, and painfully direct, it was the sound of someone picking through the wreckage of their twenties and not always liking what they found. Equal parts diary and drunken voicemail, it introduced Demolder not just as a singer-songwriter in the traditional sense, but as a brutally self-aware narrator — one just as willing to mock himself as to mourn the past.
Wishin’ I Was Fishin’, Siem Reap’s second album, doesn’t lose that intimacy, but opens up the sound — thanks in part to longtime friends and collaborators Wim Coppers (Oathbreaker, Wiegedood) on drums and Jasper Hollevoet (Ventilateur) on bass. It’s not lo-fi anymore; it’s rich, detailed, and dynamic — but still rooted in confessional songwriting, warped folk, and Demolder’s deeply dry sense of humor.
These aren’t sad songs for the sake of sadness — they’re painfully funny, uncomfortably specific, and often brutal in their honesty. Oliver Kahn turns childhood trauma and a devastating breakup into a sports metaphor. Live Love Leave slams gentrifiers over wine bar ambiance. The Purpose of Wind Chimes finds peace in a chain-smoking grandfather setting his parakeets free. And Ballerinas is basically an artist’s open letter to himself, telling him to shut up and stop whining. They read like short stories, or text messages you wish you hadn’t sent. They’re funny, until they aren’t. They’re not jokes, but they’re not tragedies either. They live in that uncomfortable space where grief becomes absurd, and absurdity becomes the only way to talk about grief.
Gilles doesn’t pretend to be a hero in these songs. If anything, he’s often the punchline: the messy partner, the bitter artist, the guy passed out in Berlin bathrooms or starting fights in bars. But there’s never cruelty in the writing — just honesty, and a willingness to sit with contradictions: shame and privilege, guilt and ego, sadness and jokes.
Siem Reap isn’t a break from the heaviness. It’s another kind of heaviness entirely — one dressed in bathrobes and bird metaphors and late-night monologues, holding a mirror up and laughing quietly at what it sees.
