Siem Reap at Rock Herk 2026

About this set

No one was really asking for a solo album from Gilles Demolder. After all, he’d already made a name for himself in Oathbreaker and Wiegedood, two of the hardest and most respected underground bands in Belgium. But when Oathbreaker broke up, along with the relationship that had fed the band’s final period, Demolder was left with little more than a laptop and a couple of cheap microphones, and started writing songs that didn’t fit anywhere else. The result was Siem Reap and the self-recorded debut album Now What? (2023). Lo-fi, confessional and painfully direct: it was the sound of someone rummaging through the debris of his twenties and not always liking what he found. The album, as much a diary as a drunken voicemail, introduced Demolder not just as a singer-songwriter in the traditional sense but as a ruthlessly self-aware narrator, someone 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 the sound, helped by old friends and collaborators Wim Coppers (Oathbreaker, Wiegedood) on drums and Jasper Hollevoet (Ventilateur) on bass. It’s no longer lo-fi; it’s rich, detailed and dynamic, but still rooted in confessional songwriting, twisted folk, and Demolder’s deeply dry sense of humour.