This show has been upgraded from Bodega to Rescue Rooms, all original tickets remain valid.
Bears in Trees are a band from Croydon, London, formed in 2014. The band consists of Iain Gillespie (vocalist, bassist, lyricist, they/them), Nicholas ‘Nick’ Peters (guitarist, lyricist, he/him), Callum Litchfield (vocalist, keys, ukulele, he/him) and George Berry (drummer, producer, he/him). They refuse to adhere to genre labels, instead preferring to refer to themselves as a ‘dirtbag boyband’. Their music tends to be very personal, often drawing from stories from lyricists Nick and Iain’s lives. There also tends to be a large focus on platonic relationships.
Bears in Trees was formed after the dissolution of Callum, Iain and Nick’s previous ‘thrash indie’ band The November Criminals. After cycling through a number of potential names, including ‘Royal Jellyfish’ and ‘George Berry’s No… The Musical’, a band name generator gave them the name ‘Bears in Submarines’. They found the name ridiculous and began riffing on it, eventually settling on Bears in Trees as a suitable name. At first they called their genre ‘hardcore ukulele punk’, “because it successfully annoyed both hardcore music elitists and punk music elitists”.
Their first release was Let’s Sleep On It in 2015. This, and other singles released in this era, have since been taken off of Spotify as of 2020, but remain on Bandcamp and Soundcloud. They released an EP named Ugh! What Time Is It? which contained early versions of songs whose finalised versions would make it onto their first album, Just Five More Minutes (2017). They then followed this with single Fly Out To Alaska and an album of short interludes named Bits n’ Pieces in 2018. The band refers to each group of related releases as an era, and the Sleep Cycle era was comprised of these releases. Their EP I See Blue (2019) and a single followed this era.
In 2020 the band released a single a month between January and May and September and December as the UK went into lockdown, starting with ‘Ramblings of a Lunatic’ – their biggest song to date. They compiled the first 5 songs into an EP titled I Want To Feel Chaotic. During lockdown the band were signed to Boston label Counter Intuitive Records. Under Counter Intuitive they released EP Keep Me Safe from the remaining 4 singles released in 2020, two-song EP Flower Through Concrete (2021), their debut studio album and everybody else smiled back (2021), single Precipitation (2022) and EP Every Moonbeam Every Feverdream (2022). They collaborated with fellow UK artist NOAHFINNCE to release No Point Pretending (2023).
In June 2023, the band rejected a major label deal they had received as a result of its exploitative nature. Their subsequent singles that year — Cassiopeia, Apathy is Boring and Bart’s Bike were released independently, and comprised the How To Stay Shining era. In 2024, the band released what they referred to as their second debut studio album, named How To Build an Ocean: Instructions. In 2025, single Left, Right, Goodnight! was released which kickstarted the Success is Unlikely era.
