The Neighbourhood announced this month that they’ll be releasing their first album since 2020, Ultrasound — a record that controversially reunites them with drummer Brandon Fried, who was fired from the alt-rock group after the Marías’ frontwoman María Zardoya accused him of sexual assault. Meanwhile, founding Neighbourhood drummer Bryan Sammis, aka Olivver the Kid, who left the band 11 years ago and was replaced by Fried, remains busy and unbothered.
Sitting with LPTV at Studio City’s Licorice Pizza Records to celebrate the 10th-anniversary vinyl reissues of his first two Olivver the Kid EPs, Freak and The Boy Who Cried Wolf, Sammis is in good spirits and always takes the high road when discussing his former band. But in a rare moment, he opens up about the “creative and personality differences” that led to his exit from the Neighbourhood.
“I guess I don’t know how much of this is technically out there. I haven’t talked about it a lot. But I didn’t quit,” Sammis reveals. “I was kicked out. Basically, me and the singer [Jesse Rutherford] didn’t get along, and for a long time it was me trying to find a bridge between him and the other guys. I was kind of playing the middleman: I was hearing these guys out, while trying to be friends with [Rutherford] and hear him out. Getting so involved, and trying to be everybody’s therapist, and having maybe over-empathy in hindsight, I think led to me getting too involved in people’s stuff. And eventually, yeah… me and [Rutherford] to this day don’t get along.
“Just with what my role was, I wasn’t having the best time,” Sammis continues, looking back on his Neighbourhood run from 2011 to 2014, which included their hit debut album I Love You. and its smash KROQ single, “Sweater Weather.” At that time, the Neighbourhood quickly developed a reputation for being attitudinal, uncompromising, and difficult (Sammis chucklingly recalls how they refused to perform on The Tonight Show because Jay Leno wouldn’t let them be filmed only in black-and-white), but apparently the conflicts werereally happening within the band’s ranks.
“It was just trending in that direction. We didn’t really get along,” says Sammis. “Touring will do that, same as with moving in with somebody. That’ll really test relationships and stuff, and you’ll realize, like, ‘Oh, maybe we were better when we were acquaintances who saw each other every now and then.’ That sort of thing.”
When Sammis, a multi-instrumentalist who “can play a little bit of everything,” realized he was being phased out of hands-on duties for the Neighbourhood’s sophomore album, it made sense for him to move on. “I think a lot of drummers can probably attest to the fact that when you’re growing up, if you can play drums and you’re good at playing drums, everybody wants you to be the drummer in their band,” he laughs, explaining how he ended up in the Neighbourhood in the first place. “I loved writing the first record, but because of the talks we had [about the next record], some of it was like… ‘Don’t help out with this, just do drums.’ And I was sort of like, ‘OK, well, I don’t love drums that much.’”
Less than a year later, Sammis reinvented himself as an indie/electronic solo act and released Freak, which he says “helped soften” the blow of leaving his successful band. “I had stuff that I’d always been working on, even when I was in high school or college, when I was making music under the name the Next Macbeth,” he says. “After I left, it was a pretty easy transition to, ‘Well, if I’m going to continue to make music and do something else, I have all these songs in me.’”
Recalling a time when the Neighbourhood once toured with “Paul Banks of Interpol,” he reveals that he once considered heeding industry advice to bill himself similarly. “That was a route that people always told me I could take,” he says. But instead of being “Bryan Sammis of the Neighbourhood,” he chose to release music as Olivver the Kid. “That’s why I’ve never really talked about [being in the Neighbourhood], or why I never have tried to use it for my gain. Even with my solo stuff and everything else, I’ve always just been like, ‘I want this stuff to do well and flourish because of me and because of my creativity, not because of the situation that I came from,’” he explains.
Since 2014, Sammis has also played in various bands, including La Bouquet, 1990 Nowhere, Bad Son, and his current trio Squirm, who just performed their first public show at Licorice Pizza Records. But he also writes soundalike production music for commercials and TV shows, a lucrative side hustle that dates back to his old job working in the royalties department of Universal Music Publishing. He’s been tasked with such assignments as writing “a Jack Antonoff/Sabrina Carpenter-type song” or tunes that evoke Dua Lipa or old-school Madonna, which he says has “really helped” him hone his songwriting skills. And he even laughingly recalls a total meta moment when he had to draw from his own past.
“I did a fairly successful album one time for this company overseas called TON, and I remember the two main [artist inspirations] for it were the Neighbourhood and the 1975. And we crushed it,” Sammis smiles. “They wanted a full album of it, like 12 songs, and when we were done with the album, we were like, ‘Should we keep this? This is kind of fire!’ … We were just listening to it, and we’re like, ‘This is rad.’ And then we gave it to them, and it’s been used at TON over the last decade.”
As much as Sammis enjoys this steady gig, it’s still “not scratching that itch that writing your own songs and writing your own lyrics and performing your own stuff can have,” so he is planning to put out a new Olivver the Kid album next year (“It’s already done. It’s great. I love it,” he gushes), as well as possibly another Squirm EP. And he enjoys the freedom of creating on his own these days. “I’m not precious about ideas, but I always have ideas,” he states. “I think very quickly in the studio, which is a superpower at a certain point, to be able to make a decision and be like, ‘That’s the one.’ I’ve been in too many bands and sessions where you’ll decide for four days, and then you’ve killed the joy of it and you’ll never put it out, because you’ve just gone over and over and over it again.”
Incidentally, the name of Sammis’s current three-piece is an acronym for “Smiling Quietly Underneath Internal Radical Melancholy,” and that just might sum up the peace that Sammis feels at this point in his life and career. “When going into [Squirm], our first EP has a lot of old Ram Dass tape teachings on it that we put over the songs. I was really going through a mode of listening to a lot of his teachings, listening to a lot of Buddhist teachings. And I guess the really dumb, easy way to put it would be: At a certain point in life, happiness is a choice,” Sammis explains.
“And no matter what happens to you, even when you’re feeling melancholy, you should feel it. It is good to feel it. Not toxic positivity, but just knowing deep down there’s a smile and that you’re having fun, doing whatever you’re doing.”
