Pet Snails and Getting Better: Meet Bears In Trees

From Ukulele Punk to Pixie Emo, to Suburban Blues; Bears In Trees has managed to cover a vast range of music genres and styles. In light of their recent release of 'It Gets Better', a song about dying your hair and recovery, the four-piece boy band from Croydon, London sat down with me on September 12th for a quick interview about making music, carrier pigeons, and the indie scene. 

[UNPUBLISHED]: Where did your love for music come from? What inspired you to start making your own?

[IAIN (BASS/VOCALS/LYRICS)]: I think my passion for making music came about in secondary school. My love for the kind of music we make now came when Nick approached me with a Fall Out Boy lyric out of the blue in the middle of the playground and we were like “We both like music, we should make it together sometime”. 

[GEORGE (DRUMS/PRODUCTION)]: When I was really young, almost two or three years old, my family took me to these big orchestral concerts and I just sort of love that and then as soon as I got the opportunity, I was like “Yeah, I’m gonna start learning instruments”. So I started with piano and didn’t really like that and I ever practiced so eventually I was like “Drums are much cooler”.

[NICK (GUITAR/LYRICS)]: My dad worked as a Cruise Ship Musician so he always had a keyboard or guitars around the house, so I just kind of started picking up from that. And then, I got into Fall Out Boy. 

[UNPUBLISHED]: Have you ever been to a Fall Out Boy concert?

[IAIN]: A couple, yeah, I’ve been to three.

[NICK]: I’ve been to two.

[CALLUM (UKULELE/VOCALS)]: And I’ve been to one!

[UNPUBLISHED]: As a band, do your different tastes in music ever clash?

[CALLUM]: I think they complement each other. 

[GEORGE]: I think we all kind of accumulate ideas from different places. We’ll have a chord progression and Iain will be like “It sounds a lot like musical theater” and we’ll just roll with it and eventually, we’ll have something that fits within the band. 

[IAIN]: And we’ll get like a little bit of folk influence, and some musical theater, and some indie or emo, and we’ll just end up with all of these influences in a single song.

[UNPUBLISHED]: Over the years, you’ve been compared to bands like The 1975 and The Front Bottoms. How would you personally describe your own style of music?

[CALLUM]: This is a lifelong struggle.

[IAIN]: I think because we like splicing so many musical traditions together, we have never really been quite a genre defined. We just kind of culminated in our own unique sound. And I think that’s why we get compared to bands like The 1975 and The Front Bottoms because they’re also a bit out of place from the scenes they’re in. 

[NICK]: We’ve called ourselves a lot of different things over the years and nothing’s really stuck. 

[IAIN]: We used to be hardcore Ukulele Punk. 

[UNPUBLISHED]: What’s the coolest part about being in a band?

[GEORGE]: We’re lucky because we were all mates before we started the band so when we’re here, we don’t really consider it work. 

[NICK]: I look forward to coming here, it’s not work for me. But also, people shouting your lyrics back at you. That’s pretty cool. 

[IAIN]: A few people have my handwriting tattooed on their bodies. That’s crazy to me!

[UNPUBLISHED]: If you could open a show for any artist or band, living or dead, who would it be?

[IAIN]: Fleetwood Mac. 

[CALLUM]: I think Stormzy would be incredible! And The Wombats or The Front Bottoms would be pretty fun to hang out with. Dodie, too. 

[IAIN]: It’s a mixture of who you want to hang out with and who you think you could put on a great show with. 

[UNPUBLISHED]: I saw that you consider yourselves completely independent. How do you think that’s had an impact on the way you work together as a band? Do you see it as a positive thing or more of a negative one?

[NICK]: I think it’s positive in the way that all of our ideas are just between us and it feels really gratifying when a song does really well or when we gain a new fan.

[CALLUM]: I think we’ve learned so much. And not just about songs and music, but also about merchandise, social media, marketing, and all those types of things. But on the negative side, we argue the most about admin. When we have to decide on the cover photo for an album, that’s when most of the arguments happen. 

[GEORGE]: We do work quite well together, despite the arguments, and we like being independent, but we don’t want to be independent forever. We’re really transparent in that way. We get the final say on everything and all, but we would like a label someday. 

[UNPUBLISHED]: What are you most looking forward to for the future of the band?

[CALLUM]: I can’t wait to tour! We just sold out the last date of our UK tour in December, and it’s still kind of sketchy as to wherever it’s actually going to happen because of COVID playing havoc with everything, but I’m so excited to actually get onto the stage and just play. It’s going to be incredible!

[NICK]: And it’ll be a room full of people we’ve never met, and that just hasn’t happened before. Usually, it’s half our fans and half our mates, but now they can’t even get tickets because they’re all sold out. 

[UNPUBLISHED]: You’ve managed to release an entire EP this year, despite the current state of the world, how would you say COVID-19 has altered your creative process?

[IAIN]: We couldn’t practice together for a good few months. 

[CALLUM]: We were quite lucky in the fact that we’d finished our first EP when lockdown hit, but we hadn’t finished our second one, which we’re releasing now. So we had to wait like a month or two to actually finish a recording, which was really difficult. We were so close to getting it done and we really wanted to get it done, but we had to do everything online. 

[UNPUBLISHED]: If you guys could only listen to one of your songs for the rest of your life, which one would it be?

[CALLUM]: We’ve got a song which we released ages ago called “Koalas”, and at the end of it, it has a kind of monologue of each of lots of songs. And they kind of overlap, so I feel like you get quite a few songs in one. 

[IAIN]: I’m gonna say one that hasn’t been released. “Safe” is going to be released in the next few months and I could probably just continue to listen to it on repeat for the rest of my life. 

[GEORGE]: My favorite song of ours is “Nights Like These”. 

[NICK]: “Fly Out To Alaska”. 

[UNPUBLISHED]: And if you had to pick a song from another artist or band, which would it be?

[IAIN]: “Twin Size Mattress” by The Front Bottoms. 

[NICK]: “American Pie”. 

[IAIN]: “American Pie” by Don McLean, that would be the one. 

[NICK]: Actually, “Forrest Gump” by Frank Ocean.

[GEORGE]: If I was talking from a production point of view, it would be “Get Lucky” by Daft Punk because it’s so beautifully produced. 

[CALLUM]: I feel like I want to pick a Taylor Swift song but I don’t know why. It would be like “Sparks Fly” by Taylor Swift. 

[UNPUBLISHED]: You guys have been together since 2014. If you had the chance to meet your 16-year-old selves, what would you tell them?

[IAIN]: Life gets much better. 

[NICK]: I think that when we started this band, none of us thought that we’d still be here in six years and in a much better position. 

[GEORGE]: I think I would’ve said “The music you’re making now isn’t very good but it’ll get better so just stick at it.”

[UNPUBLISHED]: If someone reading this article could only follow one of your social media platforms, which one would you recommend?

[IAIN]: Nick is our social media guru. 

[NICK]: I wouldn’t say that it’s just shit posting. But probably our Tik Tok. We’re always on our Tik Tok at some point in the week and we post most days. You can hear our music there and you can see us play live streams. 

[CALLUM]: I think I’d instinctively say Instagram. 

[IAIN]: I would think Twitter. 

[NICK]: And George says Facebook.

[GEORGE]: No, mine’s carrier pigeon. 

[UNPUBLISHED]: Personally, I like your Tumblr. 

[NICK]: Thank you!

[CALLUM]: That has a nice mix of shit posting and kind of nice, heartwarming posts.

[IAIN]: And a good amount of music as well. 

[UNPUBLISHED]: I have one last question for you guys. If you could pass on one message to your fans, what would it be?

[CALLUM]: I kind of want to echo our song “It Gets Better” and just say that it really does get better but I can’t because that’s too easy. 

[IAIN]: I would say something like “Love your friends. Be kind to yourself. And relax as much as possible. 

[CALLUM]: That sounds just like a cross-stitch in a mum’s house. 

[IAIN]: I was thinking “Don’t say ‘Live, Laugh, Love’!”

Make sure to keep up  with the band and to check out their latest music on 

Spotify, Apple Music, or Bandcamp.