For eleven years, Bryan Sammis let the official story stand: he left The Neighbourhood in January 2014, the band said little, and he said even less. Then, in November 2025, sitting for an interview at Licorice Pizza Records timed to the vinyl reissue of his earliest EPs, the founding drummer who now records as Olivver the Kid finally corrected the record. "I didn't quit. I was kicked out."
The admission landed at a pointed moment. The Neighbourhood had just announced its own reunion album, one that brought back Brandon Fried, the drummer who replaced Sammis the week he was pushed out. A decade of silence broke open at exactly the moment his old band was moving on without needing to say his name at all.
A Quiet Exit, By Design
Sammis co-founded The Neighbourhood with singer Jesse Rutherford in August 2011, drumming, playing percussion, and singing backing vocals through the 2013 debut album I Love You. and its touring cycle. By his account, the band's move toward more defined roles on album two came with an instruction to step back from co-writing and just play drums, a demotion that clarified for him that the kit was never his real passion. The band announced his departure in January 2014 in neutral, unexplained terms. Sammis chose not to correct it, a silence he has said was deliberate: he refused industry advice to bill himself as "Bryan Sammis of The Neighbourhood" and built the Olivver the Kid project from scratch instead, releasing his debut EP Freak that October.
The 2018 Flare-Up
The neutral framing cracked first in November 2017, when Sammis told a livestream fan that he and Rutherford didn't speak and called him "not a good person." It detonated fully in July 2018 with the single "Overreacting," which contained the line "fuck your cool band and all of your friends." Rutherford answered within a day or two under his solo alias The Factoury, releasing "gentlemen," which includes the lyric "I stabbed you in the back / You were my number one fan, let you play drums in the band." Sammis first denied the song was about Rutherford, then reversed course hours later on a livestream, confirming he'd been kicked out and disclosing an unresolved confrontation at a barbecue hosted by mutual friend Halsey where Rutherford had declined to engage.
I didn't quit. I was kicked out.
The Full Account
It took seven more years for Sammis to explain the mechanics, not just the fact, of the split. Speaking with journalist Lyndsey Parker in 2025, he described a role he'd taken on without asking for it. "Basically, me and the singer didn't get along, and for a long time it was me trying to find a bridge between him and the other guys. 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 him to this day don't get along."
I didn't quit. I was kicked out.Bryan Sammis, to Lyndsey Parker
Paid to Sound Like the Band That Cut Him
The strangest wrinkle in Sammis's story runs through his other, less visible career. Parallel to every Olivver the Kid era, La Bouquet album, and dubstep feature, he has quietly built what his official composer bio calls "a bustling career as a production music songwriter," writing sync-ready soundalikes for commercials and playlists under names like goodpeople. In 2025 he described taking assignments to write in the style of specific pop artists, and one job stood out. "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. It's been used at TON over the last decade." For years, without most of the public knowing it, Sammis was getting paid to reverse-engineer the sound of the band that had pushed him out, and doing it well enough that the tracks are still licensed today.
What Comes After the Reveal
Sammis has framed his own trajectory since 2014 as the counterargument to any bitterness: a run of projects including The Boy Who Cried Wolf, the new-wave duo La Bouquet, the nostalgia trio 1990nowhere, features with electronic producers like Said the Sky and Jason Ross, and now a new band called Squirm, which debuted live at the same Licorice Pizza Records show where the reissues dropped. He has confirmed a new, completed Olivver the Kid album is coming, a full-length arriving on his own schedule rather than anyone else's reunion clock. Even discussing the Neighbourhood's comeback directly in the same interview, he stopped short of resentment, describing his own multi-project life, sync income included, as the source of his contentment.
The record is straight now, eleven years after the fact: he didn't walk away from The Neighbourhood. He was told to leave, said nothing for over a decade, and built an entire second act, including one that occasionally got hired to imitate the very sound he'd been pushed out of.