Siem Reap

Siem Reap is the solo project of Gilles Demolder (Oathbreaker / Wiegedood). His self-recorded 2023 debut, Now What?, sounds like 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. These aren’t sad songs for the sake of sadness — they’re painfully funny, uncomfortably specific, and often brutal in their honesty. They read like short stories, or text messages you wish you hadn’t sent. They’re funny, until they aren’t. 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 late-night monologues, holding a mirror up and laughing quietly at what it sees.