So, how much longer is it going to take before Bears In Trees blow up like they’ve always been ready to? This isn’t just a case of “this band are good, they should be bigger!” either; from pretty much every conceivable angle, the readiness is screaming out. At one, there’s a quirky, wholesome, insanely TikTokable pop-rock band that online communities already can’t get enough of. At another, there’s the simple existence of a hook-penning machine on overdrive, with the intelligence and nostalgically 2000s-ish sound that place them as a cut above. (Remember T4 On The Beach? These would absolutely be favourites for that if it were still around.) Oh, and they’re also insanely capable and have proven themselves plenty already, in no small capacity on a stellar 2021 album and everybody else smiled back.
With a bit of the ol’ contemporary omniscience, though, you’d start to notice that Bears In Trees’ waves are becoming a lot more noticeable. Their festival docket for this year already has them on some not-insignificant bills, and the likelihood of using both those and a new album to springboard further is practically a dead cert. Forget being on the cusp of great things; they’re mid-leap and simply gauging how long it’ll last before they need to land. And it just so happens that the fan on their back propelling them further is How To Build An Ocean: Instructions, the album that—not to mince words here—will be the cornerstone in Bears In Trees reaching their apex.
Probably more so than and everybody else smiled back, in fact. That’s still a great little album, but for the neatest, tightest-knit tessellation of 2000s emo-pop and indie-pop and pop-rock, it really is this one. For starters, I Wanna Feel Calm might be one of Bears In Trees’ best ever songs, where the skipping guitar, squirrelly synths and bar-none catchiest vocal lines on the album form the best version of this kind of pop music. As a whole, …Instructions feels more refined and emboldened in those aspects. Your Favourite Coat wastes no time introducing the smatterings of horns for some easy zest, which get recontextualised among the strings of Tai Chi With My Dad for some lovely opulence. The production is generally sharp and clean across the board, while avoiding traps too deep into syrupy tweeness that it feels oh-so easy for Bears In Trees to fall in.
It’s a borderline marvel that a band as bedroom-pop-coded as this stick the landing like they do. That’s always been a rather agile step in Bears In Trees’ moveset, to be fair, of which …Instructions continue to break out unimpeded. A grainier filter and extraneous empty-room noise is all that’s needed to turn All You Get Is Confetti into your stock-standard, threadbare sadboi cut, but the clarity in the acoustic spareness does a world of good. Same for We Don’t Speak Anymore—it could be a solemn, piano-only affair, but the crescendo and bombast is far more satisfying in the long run. If the whole ‘dirtbag boyband’ tag can mean anything, perhaps it’s a nod towards Bears In Trees embracing pop maximalism, rather than cowering from it à la an enormous swathe of other indie acts.
Fret not, though—the ever-fond quirkiness hasn’t been drowned out just yet! And it speaks volumes that, as one of a handful of extremely isolated cases, that isn’t a bad thing at all. Maybe it’s because Iain Gillespie and Callum Litchfield actually seem comfortable delivering in their regionalised voices; they’re not abiding by TikTok artists’ bad habit of overplaying their accents to cartoonish, caricatured degrees. There’s actually a lot of legwork in just that, too. Smaller moments can feel suitably intimate, and a penchant for offbeat lyrical flourishes (for example, Things That Look Like Mistakes’ “Play me something that feels like / Dancing in my socks with my third glass of wine”) isn’t so teeth-grindingly cloying. Rather, it’s naturally literate and fun to see play out, like a lot of the millennial emo so centrally in Bears In Trees’ purview.
Maybe a direct, one-to-one comparison with Fall Out Boy is a little premature right now, but give it a few months and that’s a tune that could change in a hurry. It’s the magnitude of faith that Bears In Trees instill, as what already appears to be the best of the current indie-emo-pop cache is only getting better. Without question, …Instructions radiates the feel of a turning point, where Bears In Trees can break out of sizable but enclosed online eddies, and become as massive as they wholeheartedly deserve to be. If all the right buttons get pushed this summer, there’s a high chance of this becoming something inescapable.
For fans of: Fall Out Boy, The Wombats, NOAHFINNCE
‘How To Build An Ocean: Instructions’ by Bears In Trees is released on 26th April.
Words by Luke Nuttall
