hidingthehurt on Authenticity, New Beginnings and 'Under The City Lights'

Meet hidingthehurt. He is a complex and refreshing artist, who is entirely impossible to define or put into a box, so I won't try to do so. I've known him for coming up to two years now, with our first interview taking place over Zoom during the pandemic in 2021. Now, we meet in-person for the first time, at the Lace Market tram stop in Nottingham’s city centre.

We settle on the upstairs of Dispatch coffee shop in Hockley as the location for this interview, a quiet spot with a few people working silently on their laptops or having hushed conversations with their friends. hidingthehurt, or Ollie Greenhalgh as he is better known in his day-to-day life as a history and philosophy student at Nottingham Trent University, incidentally, isn’t a huge fan of coffee so settles for a chocolate brownie instead.

Since I was first introduced to Greenhalgh by his former manager on Twitter DMs, a lot has changed. Not only is he now in his final year of university and about to graduate, but his musical career has also come a long way. His first EP, From Fieldfare With Love, has reached 700,000 streams across all platforms since it was released exactly a year ago in April 2022.

I’m speaking with him on the release day of his second offering, Under The City Lights. “I feel good about the EP, it was good timing,” he says. “It was one thing that I’ve actually put out on time! The first EP was delayed by a few months, which had a knock-on effect on my entire schedule. So, it feels good to get this one out on time.”

The first track on the EP, Face It, was actually the final track that Greenhalgh recorded for the project. “That track was done two months ago, but I recorded most of the EP over Christmas. Face It came about because I felt there needed to be a song with more mellow instrumentation. On the singles, there wasn’t much room for listeners to enjoy what was going on behind the production.”

These singles, The Day U Said U Wanna Die, Simplicity and First Rate Education, are what “solidified the project as an experimentation" for Greenhalgh. Much like everything that he has released previously, they are difficult to define in terms of genre, something that applies to the EP as a whole. “I wouldn’t really know what genre to call it, but then I never really know what genre to call any of the music I make,” he says.

The final track on the EP, God Complex, was produced by Mixed Matches, who has a long list of production credits for artists including iayze, Weiland, and the late 6 Dogs. “He makes his own music too, which is very ambient, like a soundscape. I knew I’d be ending the whole artistry with that song, so I wanted to end it on a high note and the track list just made so much sense in that order.”

You may be confused as to what he means by this statement, especially if you haven’t seen his most recent post on Instagram. He won’t be giving up music all together but instead will simply be putting the hidingthehurt project to one side and moving on to a new chapter. 

“I realised that all of the things that I was talking about and discussing, I’d done it enough. There was no reason to hold onto it, so I’m letting it go. I’m in a different stage of my life to where I was back then. I’m a lot more focused and stable on what it is that I want, than I was back then,” he says.

“There’s no reason to speak about that stuff anymore, so it’s time to let it go and move on. I think every artist goes through it at some point and has to change their style and what they want to talk about. I think it was important now. I’m almost 21 years old, it seemed like the right time to mature.”

His new moniker may still be undecided, but his vision of what the new era will sound like is complete. He plans to maintain the emotional vulnerability of his music, merging this with more upbeat instrumentation, such as funk and house music. “Those genres tend to focus on repetitive topics, but I think it’s time someone made something a bit more meaningful, to give it a new edge,” he says.

He’s aware that this may divide his current fanbase, but he is looking forward to gaining new fans as he ventures into genres that he has not experimented with before. “It would be naïve to say everyone will stick with it, but both styles are me. I’ve already had a lot of people say they’ll continue to support me, which is nice to hear. But I think the majority of people will be new.”

This may be seen as a bold move for Greenhalgh, who has spent the past few years building up this community of supporters. But no matter what, one person he has always remained loyal to is himself. Authenticity has been key to everything he has created thus far and when he began to feel he was no longer aligned with what he was making, he had to make a change.

“It wasn’t difficult for me to make that decision, but I think that might just be a trait I have. A lot of people who make music listen to what’s popular and try to recreate it, but I never did that. There’s a pressure from what you see is popular, even in terms of lyrical topics. But if it wasn’t me then I never spoke on it and that’s always worked for me,” he says.

Greenhalgh will look back on his time as hidingthehurt fondly, but it’s the people who he met during the past few years that he will miss the most. “I know they won’t evaporate,” he says with a laugh, “but I’ll miss the community I have built and met. Who knows if it’s going to go well, or if it’s going to go badly? But I wouldn’t be doing the new project without the old one, so I think I’ll just look back and be happy I did it.”

hidingthehurt's new EP 'Under The City Lights' is out now

@hidingthehurt._