Olivver the Kid is the recording name of Bryan Sammis, the founding drummer of The Neighbourhood who left the band in January 2014 and built a solo career defined by restless reinvention: EPs about addiction allegory, a run of side bands, a lucrative parallel career writing sync music for commercials, and features with electronic producers. In 2025, more than a decade after his exit, Sammis gave his fullest account yet of how that departure actually happened, revealing publicly for the first time in detail that he was not a quiet resignation but was, in his words, kicked out.
Bryan Sammis's official composer biography, filed with Universal Production Music, traces his roots to Hempstead, New York, before a move to Los Angeles during high school. He graduated from Oak Park High School in Oak Park, California, in Ventura County, in 2008, where he played football, founded the school's Poetry Club, and served as the school mascot. He began playing drums at age nine and, at sixteen, started his first music project, a solo outlet called The Next Macbeth, which soon became simply Oliver, releasing an EP titled Catharsis around 2008 and 2009.
After high school, Sammis was accepted into Loyola University New Orleans to study Music Business. Accounts of whether he actually enrolled differ slightly: his official bio describes him attending, while a filmed interview has him saying he was accepted and did not go, dropping the pursuit with roughly one semester of commitment left before joining what became The Neighbourhood full time. Before that, he had worked at Universal Music Publishing, first in the Film and TV department and then briefly in Royalties, leaving that job to help found the band.
Sammis met singer Jesse Rutherford through the local Hollywood and Ventura County band scene, and The Neighbourhood formed in August 2011. Sammis was the band's eldest founding member, 22 at the time of the group's 2013 debut album I Love You., versus Rutherford's 21, and he served as drummer, percussionist, and backing vocalist through the album's touring cycle. By his own account, his heart was never fully committed to the drum kit alone: as the band moved toward more defined roles during work on a second record, he says he was told to step back from co-writing and just do drums, a marginalization that clarified for him that drumming was never his real passion.
The Neighbourhood announced Sammis's departure in January 2014, shortly after the I Love You. touring cycle, with very little public explanation given at the time. He was replaced by Brandon Fried. For years afterward, Sammis largely declined to discuss the circumstances of the split, a silence he has attributed to a deliberate choice not to build his solo career on his former band's name recognition.
His stage name went through several iterations before it settled: The Next Macbeth at sixteen, then Oliver for the Catharsis EP, then Olivver, the spelling used during his time behind the kit in The Neighbourhood, and finally Olivver the Kid for the solo career that followed his exit. He has said the transition was faster and smoother than people might expect, because he already had a backlog of unreleased material. "I had stuff that I'd always been working on, even when I was in high school or college," he told journalist Lyndsey Parker in 2025. "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.'"
Less than a year after leaving the band, he released his debut EP as Olivver the Kid, Freak, on October 31, 2014, a record he has said helped soften the blow of exiting a suddenly successful band. Early singles "Attica '71," which went on to top 1.4 million plays on SoundCloud, and "Lucy (Hurt People Hurt People)" built his first solo fanbase quickly enough that within roughly a year of leaving The Neighbourhood he had landed a headlining tour in Russia, plus tour support slots with Halsey and FMLYBND.
He explicitly turned down industry advice to bill himself as "Bryan Sammis of The Neighbourhood," a marketing route he says people compared to how Interpol's Paul Banks, a band The Neighbourhood had toured with, is sometimes positioned by association. He chose a wholly separate identity instead. "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," he said. "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."
Olivver the Kid's second EP, The Boy Who Cried Wolf, arrived on October 16, 2015, preceded by the single "World on Fire." It is a tightly built five-song concept piece built around an extended wolves-and-woods metaphor for addiction, with tracks including "BBBlue" and "Hell." Sammis has confirmed the allegorical read directly: when an interviewer suggested the wolves represent people who have succumbed to addiction, he responded simply, "Yes, perfect." He has also described the writing process as unusually focused: "We didn't write any other songs, we wrote five." Plans for the video for lead track "The Woods" called for shooting it literally in a forest.
Visually, Olivver the Kid's brand has consistently trended toward moody, DIY, lo-fi aesthetics, a contrast to The Neighbourhood's rigorously enforced black-and-white house style. A 2015 interviewer recalled Sammis showing up to a Central Park interview in overalls and pink hair, then appearing the following night at a headlining show in black jeans and a leather jacket with red silk lining, a deliberate range spanning playful and goth-adjacent looks within the same release cycle. His earliest confessional short-form video work, "Purge" (2014), was a symbolically loaded piece about expelling negative influences following the band split. Obey Clothing's 2015 "Emerging Artist" feature situated him within LA's skate and streetwear-adjacent scene rather than a mainstream pop apparatus. His branding has also leaned on stylized alternate spellings as a signature quirk, cycling between "Olivver," the Scandinavian-style slashed-O "Ølivver," and the shorthand "ØV."
In 2016, Sammis temporarily shelved Olivver the Kid, releasing the single "Pink Tires. Smile Lines." as an announced farewell to the project, and pivoted fully to a new duo, La Bouquet, formed with Jake Lopez. He has said the impulse to start a band came directly from seeing The Cure at the Hollywood Bowl. La Bouquet's debut EP, Heavy Sunshine, arrived November 10, 2017, leaning into an '80s post-punk and new-wave register with singles "Loveless" and "Kiss Me Kill Me."
The band's debut full-length, Sad People Dancing, was largely recorded alongside Heavy Sunshine but was delayed for months by a distinctly modern indie-label hazard: the group's original label was acquired by a major, which declined to retain a developing, not-yet-profitable act, forcing La Bouquet to be dropped and re-signed elsewhere before the record could finally come out via Amuse Records in April 2019. Sammis has cited Danny Elfman's Edward Scissorhands score as a key influence on the project, and has reflected on the challenge of writing without the naivety of youth: "Once you start knowing a little too much, things can seem a little more contrived... I'm 28, and 18-year-olds aren't waiting. You have to keep moving."
A second La Bouquet album, The Big Happy, was billed as a collaboration with Olivver the Kid and recorded remotely during the pandemic, intended from the outset as the band's swan song. La Bouquet officially disbanded in December 2021 after five years, with Sammis and later member Drew Bruchs continuing to perform together under the 1990nowhere banner while Sammis resumed the Olivver the Kid solo name in full.
The Neighbourhood's 2014 announcement of Sammis's exit was framed in neutral terms, and for years he said little publicly. That began to change in November 2017, when, during an Instagram livestream, a fan asked whether Sammis still talked to Rutherford. He said the two do not talk and called Rutherford "not a good person," the first clear public signal that the exit had not been amicable.
The rift became impossible to ignore in July 2018, when Sammis released the single "Overreacting," containing the pointed lyric "fuck your cool band and all of your friends." Rutherford appeared to respond within a day or two, posting two new solo tracks under his own alias, The Factoury: "gentlemen," which includes the line "Took you all over the world... I stabbed you in the back / You were my number one fan, let you play drums in the band," and "kø," a title widely read as a nod to Olivver the Kid's occasional ØV stylization. Facing fan speculation and harassment, Sammis first denied on Twitter that "Overreacting" was about Rutherford, then, in a subsequent Instagram livestream the same day, contradicted the band's original amicable framing directly. He revealed that he had been kicked out by Rutherford specifically, and confirmed he had not remained friends with anyone from the band. He also disclosed that the tension behind the song stemmed partly from an unresolved encounter weeks earlier at a barbecue hosted by mutual friend Halsey, where he had tried to address their history and Rutherford reportedly did not want to engage.
The fullest account came in November 2025, when Sammis spoke with veteran music journalist Lyndsey Parker at Licorice Pizza Records, timed to the vinyl reissue of his first two EPs and arriving just as The Neighbourhood was announcing its own reunion album with a returning Brandon Fried, the drummer who had replaced him. "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. I was kicked out," Sammis said. "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. 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." Even in this candid interview, Sammis is described as taking the high road on his old band's parallel reunion news, framing his own trajectory, a busy multi-project solo career plus a lucrative sync-writing side career, as a source of contentment rather than resentment.
In 2020, Sammis formed the nostalgia-leaning pop-rock trio 1990nowhere with Chris Blair, who records as Lostboycrow, and Olen Kittelsen, who records as Armors. The three met through a joint La Bouquet and Armors show, then wrote the single "$20" together in a single five-hour studio session, a track that served as a precursor to the full project. Their self-titled EP followed, including the single "Sundance Kid," built around a deliberate early-2000s pop-rock nostalgia hook. "Personally I have always been enamored with nostalgia," Sammis said of the project. "It's one of the strongest emotions one can feel."
That same period saw Sammis cross into melodic dubstep, featuring on "Worth Living For" with producer Said the Sky and spoken-word artist Levi the Poet in September 2020, followed in 2021 by "We Know Who We Are," another collaboration with Said the Sky that included a companion acoustic version.
Running parallel to every band and solo era, Sammis has maintained what his official Universal Production Music bio calls "a bustling career as a production music songwriter," working across indie, pop, and hip-hop albums for sync placement. Under the collective name goodpeople, he co-wrote "Just Like Me," a track that became a viral hit after being used in a 2016 Bud Light Lime commercial.
In his 2025 interview, Sammis described the mechanics of this soundalike sync-writing side hustle in more detail: assignments to write songs mimicking specific pop artists, a Jack Antonoff and Sabrina Carpenter-type song, or material evoking Dua Lipa or vintage Madonna, work he says has sharpened his own songwriting instincts. In a full-circle anecdote, he recalled a job for an overseas music library company called TON that explicitly asked for a sound modeled on The Neighbourhood and The Neighbourhood's contemporaries the 1975. "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." Parker highlighted the same story in her own recap of the conversation, describing it as an amusing anecdote about being hired to write songs that sounded like his own former band, and of course crushing it.
On the recording side, Sammis has relied heavily on Bandcamp as a direct-to-fan distribution channel dating back to the 2008 and 2009 Catharsis EP, including instrumental versions of full projects. His current relationship with Licorice Pizza Records, the Studio City, California independent record shop and label, spans both the 10th-anniversary vinyl reissues of his earliest EPs and the live debut of his current band, Squirm.
Beyond indie rock, Olivver the Kid has built a recurring presence in electronic and dance music as a featured vocalist. Monstercat's own artist bio for Sammis states he "has collaborated with Skizzy Mars, G-Eazy, Dabin, Said The Sky, and other well known artists," citing over 100 million streams on Spotify across his catalog, though that aggregate figure comes from label promotional copy rather than an independently audited count. Confirmed features include Skizzy Mars's "Time" alongside G-Eazy, the dubstep-leaning "Catharsis" with Au5 and Skybreak, and "Love Song Underwater" with SadBois.
His most prominent placement in the electronic mainstream came in 2024, featuring on "Space Between," from producer Jason Ross's Divergence EP on Monstercat, a melodic dubstep and trance crossover that extended his collaborator network well beyond indie and alt-rock circles.
Late 2025 brought a wave of activity built around Sammis's earliest catalog and his newest band. Licorice Pizza Records released 10th-anniversary vinyl reissues of both Freak and The Boy Who Cried Wolf. At the same venue, Sammis debuted a new trio called Squirm, playing its first public show there; beyond that debut and its billing as his current band, further details of the project's lineup and material remain undocumented publicly. In the same period, Sammis confirmed that a new, completed Olivver the Kid album is finished and slated for release the following year.
The timing overlapped directly with news of The Neighbourhood's own reunion album, featuring the return of Brandon Fried, the drummer who had replaced Sammis in 2014, a juxtaposition the Lyndsanity interview addressed head-on rather than avoided. In January 2026, Sammis released "Dream Sequence," a rock and indie-tagged single that stands as his most recent confirmed solo output.
Sammis has cultivated a public persona defined by emotional candor, self-deprecating humor, and an unusually open relationship to mental health topics relative to many of his indie-rock peers. "I have A LOT of fucks to give," he said in a 2015 interview. "That level of intensity about giving a shit, that's what I feel like separates me from other people." A 2019 interview thread circulated widely in Neighbourhood fan communities specifically for his frank discussion of depression and anxiety, including a self-deprecating anecdote about waking up half drunk in a widow's attic.
His songwriting consistently mines personal pain into allegory rather than direct confession, with The Boy Who Cried Wolf's wolves-and-woods metaphor for addiction the clearest example; he has said he deliberately keeps some of his most personal meanings vague enough for people to relate to rather than fully explaining them. At the same time, he is capable of turning direct and confrontational when provoked, as the "Overreacting" episode with Rutherford demonstrated, even while professing, in his 2025 interview, that his current stance is simply moving on and choosing contentment; that interview is itself titled around the idea that happiness is a choice. Parker's own recap of the conversation lists Buddhism among the topics discussed.
Before and around his music career, Sammis has described formative interest in service-oriented work: camp counseling, basketball coaching, and a stint as a guest teacher at Loyola in New Orleans. Asked in 2015 why he thinks he exists, his answer was simply, "To help."
| Year | Event |
|---|---|
| 2008–2009 | Releases Catharsis EP under the earlier alias Oliver; graduates Oak Park High School (2008) |
| Aug 2011 | The Neighbourhood forms with Sammis on drums, percussion and backing vocals |
| 2013 | Debut album I Love You. released; Sammis is the band's eldest founding member |
| Jan 2014 | Sammis departs The Neighbourhood; replaced by Brandon Fried |
| Oct 2014 | Debut EP as Olivver the Kid, Freak, released |
| 2015 | Headlining tour in Russia; support slots with Halsey and FMLYBND; The Boy Who Cried Wolf EP released |
| 2016 | "Pink Tires. Smile Lines." announced as a farewell single; pivots to duo La Bouquet with Jake Lopez; "Just Like Me" (as goodpeople) becomes a viral Bud Light Lime commercial hit |
| Nov 2017 | La Bouquet's debut EP Heavy Sunshine released; Sammis first publicly signals the Rutherford rift on Instagram Live |
| Jan 2018 | Olivver the Kid revived via cryptic teasers with comeback single "Bitter" |
| Jul 2018 | "Overreacting" single triggers the public back-and-forth with Jesse Rutherford's Factoury project |
| Apr 2019 | La Bouquet's delayed debut LP Sad People Dancing released via Amuse Records |
| 2020 | Forms 1990nowhere with Lostboycrow and Armors; features on Said the Sky's "Worth Living For" |
| Dec 2021 | La Bouquet disbands after five years with LP2 The Big Happy |
| 2024 | Features on Jason Ross's "Space Between" (Monstercat) |
| Late 2025 | 10th-anniversary vinyl reissues of Freak and The Boy Who Cried Wolf; new trio Squirm debuts live; gives fullest public account of the Neighbourhood exit |
| Jan 2026 | Releases single "Dream Sequence"; new album confirmed for the year ahead |
Bryan Sammis has said the split was not amicable. In 2018 he revealed he had been kicked out by Jesse Rutherford specifically, and in a detailed 2025 interview he described a breakdown rooted in trying to be a bridge, and eventually everybody's therapist, between Rutherford and the rest of the band, alongside a creative marginalization in which he was told to step back from co-writing and just do drums.
Sammis initially denied it on Twitter, then in a same-day Instagram livestream contradicted that denial, confirming the tension behind the song and disclosing that he and Rutherford had crossed paths shortly before its release at a barbecue hosted by mutual friend Halsey. Rutherford appeared to respond within a day or two with two tracks under his own alias, The Factoury.
He has also fronted La Bouquet, an '80s post-punk-leaning duo and later trio with Jake Lopez and Drew Bruchs that released two albums before disbanding in 2021, and 1990nowhere, an early-2000s nostalgia pop-rock trio with Lostboycrow's Chris Blair and Armors' Olen Kittelsen. As of late 2025 he also plays in a newer band called Squirm.
Yes. Alongside his artist output, Sammis has maintained a long parallel career writing production and sync music, including work for a viral 2016 Bud Light Lime commercial under the name goodpeople and soundalike commissions for overseas music libraries.
As of the November 2025 interview, Sammis confirmed a new, completed Olivver the Kid album slated for release the following year, following the January 2026 single "Dream Sequence" and the 10th-anniversary vinyl reissues of his first two EPs.
| Title | Type | Year |
|---|---|---|
| Catharsis (as Oliver) | EP | 2008–2009 |
| Freak | EP | 2014 |
| The Boy Who Cried Wolf | EP | 2015 |
| The Red Balloon Project | Album | 2015 |
| Alone Together | Album | 2016 |
| Bitter | Single | 2018 |
| Overreacting | Single | 2018 |
| Hero | Single | 2019 |
| 1990Nowhere (self-titled, with Lostboycrow & Armors) | EP | 2020 |
| Worth Living For (with Said the Sky & Levi the Poet) | Single | 2020 |
| We Know Who We Are (with Said the Sky) | Single | 2021 |
| Sentiment | Album | 2021–2022 |
| Space Between (Jason Ross feat. Olivver the Kid) | Single | 2024 |
| Dream Sequence | Single | 2026 |
| Heavy Sunshine (as La Bouquet) | EP | 2017 |
| Sad People Dancing (as La Bouquet) | Album | 2019 |
| The Big Happy (as La Bouquet, w/ Olivver the Kid) | Album | 2021 |
Monstercat's artist bio credits Olivver the Kid with over 100 million streams on Spotify across his combined catalog and features, a figure that comes from label promotional copy rather than an independently audited public metric.
Olivver the Kid's story runs directly through The Neighbourhood, the band he co-founded and left in 2014, and through his long, complicated relationship with frontman Jesse Rutherford, whose own 2018 response tracks as The Factoury remain the clearest public counterpoint to Sammis's account of the split. Readers interested in the mechanics of that band's visual and commercial evolution, and its own 2025 reunion news involving returning drummer Brandon Fried, will find useful context on The Neighbourhood's page.