Oliver Tree Nickell was the kind of artist who made you check whether the joke was on you. He built a persona called Alien Boy out of a bowl cut, thrifted 1980s windbreakers, oversized scooters, and absurdist videos he directed himself. At CalArts he reportedly wrote a thesis on how to turn yourself into a meme, and then he spent the next decade proving the theory on himself.
He was born June 29, 1993, in Santa Cruz, California, and started out making dubstep in the Bay Area before signing to Atlantic. The 2016 track “When I’m Down” with Whethan raised his profile. The 2018 EP “Alien Boy” made the character a phenomenon, and his self-directed “All That x Alien Boy” video passed 50 million views. By the time “Life Goes On” became his biggest hit, it was soundtracking millions of videos and he had built an audience of more than 15 million on TikTok alone.
Part of the act was never letting anyone be sure it was real. He staged fake retirements. He had himself wheeled out in a coffin to bagpipes. So when word spread Sunday that he had died, a lot of people online assumed it was another bit, one more fake-out from the guy who treated his own mythology as a canvas.
It wasn’t. Oliver Tree died Sunday morning, June 14, 2026, when two helicopters collided over Rio de Janeiro. Six people were killed, including the Argentine YouTuber Gaspar Prim, known online as Gaspi. He was touring “Love You Madly, Hate You Badly,” the fourth studio album he produced entirely himself, released just two months ago in April. He was 32.
His biggest song was called “Life Goes On.” He spent years insisting nothing about him should be taken at face value. The one thing he never got to walk back is the realest.
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