In Conversation With Bears in Trees
By Kaitlin Shaw
Bears in Trees are a refreshing anomaly, defying genre labels and embracing their distinct identity as a “dirtbag boyband.” Originating from Croydon, South London, this band of childhood friends, Callum Litchfield, Iain Fillespie, Nick Peters and George Berry, have been making waves since their formation in 2024. In the run up to their new album, releasing on the 26th of April, this interview delves into their experience as artists and as bandmates.
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This Interview has been edited for length and clarity
Hearing Aid (Kaitlin Shaw):You tend to reject genre labels, you’ve labelled yourself as a “dirtbag boyband,” what exactly does this mean for you guys?
Iain Fillespie: I was very heavily involved in rock climbing in my early twenties and, basically, in that community there are these people that are called “dirtbags” and they kind of reject everything and go in a van and climb all the time. Me and Nick were watching ‘Valley Uprising’ which is a film about the Yosemite Rock Climbers and it's just about this total freedom and fully committing to living that vague life.
Boyband because generally people shy away from that and they want to take themselves a little bit more seriously. We just thought it was a funny combination of things, this idea of this free and nomadic person but also being a boy band which is seen as this clean cookie-cutter kind of thing. It's a rejection of these kinds of people.
Callum Litchfield: One Direction if they went to live in the woods for a few years.
HA: I read that your original name was Bears in Submarines, is that right?
Fillespie: It’s partly true.
Litchfield: At some point it was.
Fillespie: We were struggling to come up with a band name we all liked back when we were starting. We went on a band name generator and it came out with Bears in Submarines but we thought it was really dumb.
Litchfield: We thought it was hilarious, that’s the funniest thing I've ever heard in my life. Classic comedy.
Fillespiel: So we started riffing off it, Bears in Bushes… Bears in Tubes…
Litchfield: and Bears in Trees came out and we were like “we’ve hit it, that's the one.”
HA: Last year, March, you opened for Lovejoy. What did you learn from that? What did you enjoy? Tell me about the experience
Fillespie: The most amazing part of it was playing in Ireland for the first time.
Litchfield: That was really cool
Nick Peters: Lovejoy crowds were wild, I’ve never heard any crowd like that.
George Berry: Their fans were all so lovely
Litchfield: The venue we played at in Dublin was on this one way cobbled street and we had to literally drive the band round twice because the first time we came we couldn't stop. Fans were like “no move out the way there's a car coming.” It was good fun. The fans were really lovely and obviously lovejoy themselves were very lovely. They came and said hello and we had a chat and everything, very sweet guys.
HA: You mentioned as well that you’d like to perform in Japan. Is there a particular reason for that?
Litchfield: I just think it would be cool. I love the culture. I love Japanese food. It’d be cool. I’d like to go to a payphone in Tokyo and live out Phoebe Bridgers’ song ‘Kyoto’. It’s like a fantasy. That’d be great.
Berry: I want an authentic katsu curry.
HA: Did growing up in South London have any influence over your music now, do you think?
Fillespie: Yeah, I think so. I think that because in Croydon, there was one venue that we were able to use called the Scream Lounge, which was, I’m pretty sure, illegally run. It was a dive bar, you could fit eighty people in there; they would cram like two-hundred. There wasn’t really a cohesive scene for guitar music, so it was basically just all of us cramming into this one venue, it didn’t really work and it closed down.
I think that lack of a scene was what inspired us, and then we went online. We went to other communities in America, around the UK, around the world, and we found our inspiration from the communities that we wanted to be a part of on the internet. It’s like All That Boy, Michael Kromitz, Modern Baseball, Front Bottoms, that kind of thing. UK indie is a kind of amorphous solid. I think that it was the fact that we didn’t really have a scene growing up at all, that then allowed us to be more free and experimental with where we wanted to go.
Berry: I think especially with the album, just living in Croydon naturally influences your day-to-day and you just end up naturally writing about that kind of stuff as it happens.
HA: So, in terms of social media. You have a large following on Tiktok, and your videos are so fun and unique. Where do you get your inspiration for those videos?
Peters: It’s what we find funny, I guess. I also just like being on the internet, seeing memes and shitposts and stuff and being like, “this is great… how can we make this about us?”
Litchfield: We also call ourselves like 50% boy band, 50% improv comedy troupe. One of us will come in and go “I’ve seen this Tiktok, this is the idea.”Nick does a lot of social media, but we try to go through and scroll through Tiktok for an hour, get good ideas and recreate them in a way that benefits us.
Fillespie: The more unique stuff, we all have very similar senses of humour and we just like making stupid jokes with each other. I think we’re friends first, band second.
HA: In terms of the new album, did you have any challenges making it?
Fillespie: We had a good few challenges.
Litchfield: We struggled with writing it.. We’d come off of releasing an EP and then going on tour with You Me at Six, played the biggest shows we’d ever played, played with Lovejoy, and then we were like “oh now we’ve got to write an album” and we basically forgot how to write songs. So, it did take lots of trial and error, lots of writing, lots of songs, so many songs. We didn’t really take any breaks.
We then went away for a weekend, just the four of us, and we were able to take a break. We were able to just go back to us and this fluffy cat. We were able to make food for ourselves, do our own cooking, make breakfast and then just write songs. It was a good time.
HA: What artists inspired the new album?
Fillespie: So many, so many. I think we've got the Wombats, Block Party, a lot of that kind of 2010 indie scene. Also, there's Phoebe bridges and boygenius and that kind of American folk. There's inspiration from 80s music and Bleachers and those pastiches and the 1975. Weasel was a massive one!
We draw from a lot of influences and inspirations because we all like such a wide range of music and what we want to do is take those in and then reflect that into how we see the world.
Litchfield: Genre is dead, we’re a dirtbag boyband, we listen to all of the genres!
HA: Your lyrics are very sad but your songs sound very happy and upbeat. How do you decide what the songs are going to sound like and what's your process?
Fillespie: Me and Nick write the lyrics. We grew up listening to a lot of emo music, very dark, very morose lyrics. One thing that we took away is that we feel that there needs to be a space to have language to articulate pain.
There needs to be a space of catharsis and processing within music. But we don't want to overly indulge in that dark space. We want to find that light at the end of it. I also love when things are almost a celebration of the absurdity of life.
So, you have these dark moments, these dark messages about the more vulnerable parts of yourself. But you do that in a way that's dancey and joyous and celebratory so that everyone feels that solidarity in this.
HA: How do you decide what to put on the album and what not to put on?
Fillespie: Make presentations!
Litchfield: We had a list of twenty-two songs.The job is to make a PowerPoint presentation, often involving monster trucks or motorcycles.
Fillespie: It feels like a game show, you’ve got to try and make people laugh.
Litchfield: Then you present your album, your perfect album. So the songs, the order, and reasons why you've chosen this order. Then nine times out of ten, we agree on 60 -70% of the songs, and then we have to pick the last couple where we all disagree. This time I think it was pretty easy.
HA: Is there anything else you’d like to add?
Fillespie: It feels like with this album, everything we've gone through over the last few years – touring and meeting other bands, experimenting with other sounds, being signed to a label, and then deciding to be independent and making it ourselves and taking control of it – all of that is culminating in this album. It feels like the most perfect version of what it should be and it feels like a really nice moment for us. We're really excited about that and we want that to be spoken about everywhere .
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Bears in Trees new album is coming out on the 26th of April, so make sure to pre-order it!