Your songs often take things lots of us experience, self-doubt, pressure, feeling lost or overwhelmed, and turn them into something quite cathartic. Is that something you consciously do, or is it simply where your songwriting naturally takes you?

I think it is quite conscious, but probably a little bit natural as well, because songwriting for me has always been, like it is for a lot of people, a bit of an escape and a way of getting those feelings down onto vinyl, CD, tape or whatever.

When I sit down to write a song, it’s always, ‘What’s been bugging us recently?’ It normally ends up being something quite internal rather than external, so it’s always quite self-reflective.

I always try to put a positive spin on things too. With a lot of Ten Eighty Trees songs there can be some quite heavy topics and emotions going on, but I try to make sure there’s some kind of positive resolution towards the end because I’m a big believer that things have to get better at some point.

That’s something I noticed about ‘Always On’. In other Ten Eighty Trees songs there often seems to be a way out, whether that’s starting again, stopping the self-destruction or finding some kind of reset. This one felt more like sitting next to somebody and saying, ‘I know you’re overwhelmed, I am too. Let’s just sit here with that for a minute.’ Was that deliberate?

For the majority of the song, yeah. It was putting pen to paper about those feelings of being overwhelmed and struggling with quite literally always feeling like you are switched on.

That’s very much a symptom of the modern world. You’re constantly bombarded with information, and a lot of it is to do with being in a band as well. These days you don’t get any let-up. You’ve got to be posting stuff somewhere on the internet every day.

That’s the way Ten Eighty Trees has to work because we don’t have the money to put into PR and things like that, so what’s at our disposal? All these social media outlets that we can actively spam people on, basically just flood the zone with Ten Eighty Trees content!

But it’s interesting you say it feels like sitting next to someone and saying, ‘This is what’s going on’, because I think the final line ties everything up quite well:

‘You’re everywhere at once, nowhere at all, but when it comes around, were you ever really there at all?’

It’s saying you’ve got to get out of this headspace, otherwise you’ll end up wasting your whole life being so focused and driven that you never take a step back and appreciate the wider picture.

It’s not necessarily a positive ending, but there is a resolution. You come to the realisation that you need to take a step back, after two minutes and 54 seconds of quite intense punk music.

Do you think that pressure to be constantly productive, refreshing, consuming and on a screen comes particularly from life as a musician, or does everybody feel it now?

I think a lot of people feel it. People in creative spaces particularly feel that negative need to be present online and in people’s faces.

People might think I really love being that person, but it’s not what I signed up for. I’ve been in and around music long enough to know that isn’t why I got into it. I just wanted to write some songs and have a nice time playing them live.

The promotion side probably takes up 80% of the time now. But creativity comes from the space away from all that information. You’re never so creative after spending an hour scrolling.

I always feel more creative after half an hour where I’ve disconnected from my phone. The TV isn’t on, the radio isn’t on, you’re just sitting in silence. As long as you’re doing nothing and you haven’t got that sensory overload going on, you’re being reflective, and that’s when the creative juices really start to flow for me.

I’ve had conversations with other musicians who’ve said, ‘I’ve been chronically online for months because I’ve had gigs to promote and music to promote. I need a break so I can focus on being a musician again.’

That space is where a lot of the real magic happens.

There’s quite a tension in Ten Eighty Trees songs between the subject matter and the music. How do you convey that restless mental state without the music becoming completely chaotic, while still creating those melodies and earworms?

I’ve always found myself less of a storyteller and more of a ‘feeling teller’. I can portray emotion and states of being quite well in songs, rather than being somebody like Alex Turner on those first couple of Arctic Monkeys albums, where it was very much storytelling about being in Sheffield.

I think it’s natural for me not to write music that completely mirrors the lyrics because of the music I was brought up on. I wasn’t brought up on crazy metal music, as much as I love it now. I was brought up on Green Day and Foo Fighters, American rock bands with a real ear for melody. Going back further, one of the first bands I was ever into as a kid was The Rolling Stones. Again, really strong melodies.

I don’t see it as unfitting to have a strong melody alongside quite dissonant lyrical topics. Every song I write has to have a strong melody because, at the end of the day, I’ve got to remember it!

I always say to the lads in Ten Eighty Trees, ‘Can you sing back the song we’ve just played?’ If they can, it’s going to be a hit. For us, at least.

I have to ask about the jazz. You studied jazz music, but I’m not convinced there’s a lot of obvious jazz in the music. Has it gone somewhere else, or is it tucked away where we just might not notice it?

I’ve never been a big jazz head, per se. I’m really going to offend a lot of jazz musicians here, but a lot of jazz musicians will tell you, ‘This is the pinnacle of music. If you know how to play jazz, you can do anything.’

Part of me was on board with that thinking when I did my degree. If I can do this, the world’s my oyster and we can do whatever we want.

There are strong melodic attachments to jazz music, there’s a lot of really dissonant jazz, but a lot of popular jazz songs still have incredible melodies.

I think it’s a common misconception that Ten Eighty Trees comes from a jazz background. It’s more that two-thirds of Ten Eighty Trees have dabbled in jazz and have a bachelor’s degree in it! The course wasn’t just jazz, it was jazz, popular and commercial music. As much as I had to analyse Count Basie, my final performance for the degree was a collection of Prince songs.

It’ll always come up though: ‘You guys are jazz guys, aren’t you? Name me five jazz artists.’

No. Please don’t.

‘Bittersweet Coming of Age’ feels like an appropriate title for a band that has been around since 2018. Does Ten Eighty Trees in 2026 know what it is in a way Ten Eighty Trees in 2018 didn’t?

Absolutely. The line-up is certainly different to what it was in 2018, but this incarnation of Ten Eighty Trees is definitely closer to the band I think I always wanted to be in. It just hits a little bit harder.

That’s no disrespect to anybody who was in Ten Eighty Trees previously. It’s more that I’ve pushed myself harder with the songwriting and the lads have contributed a different angle.

The first logo Ten Eighty Trees had was this drippy B-movie horror kind of logo, like something you’d see on a horror movie poster, and it reflected our first single. Then very quickly we started dabbling in the lighter end of alternative rock. We still had heavy riffs, but there was more new wave getting chucked into the mix, guitars that sounded quite synth-based, and the logo became much more streamlined too.

We’ve now gone full circle and brought that original horror-esque logo back because it’s more in keeping with the sound of Ten Eighty Trees in 2026, which was actually closer to the original vision for the band in 2018.

The latest EP is by far one of the heavier things we’ve done in recent years. We went through a slightly emo, Weezer-esque phase a couple of years ago, but since then it has come back to guitar riffs, a little more post-hardcore influence, and Mark has definitely added a more metallic edge with his drumming style.

Ten Eighty Trees is a much harder-hitting outfit now. I think it’s the more refined and matured version of the band.

And it’s a lot of fun playing live.

Ten Eighty Trees has supported some sizeable bands, sold out your own shows and played some major festivals. Was there a particular moment when you realised, ‘We’ve actually got something here’?

We went through some growing pains about two and a half years ago where Ten Eighty Trees could very easily have ceased to exist. But I never know when things should stop or be put to bed, so I thought, ‘No, I want to keep doing this.’

Mark came in on drums and Jordan on bass, although for five or six months at the start of 2025 it was me and Mark with a rotating bill of bass players. It was really hard work because I was constantly training people to learn the songs.

The moment when I thought, ‘We really can’t stop now’, was July last year when we were asked to play Kendal Calling. There was clearly a lot of gas still left in the tank. After all those years of graft, we finally had a major festival slot, and that was the moment I knew this was definitely worth pursuing.

We’ve gone from strength to strength since then. We’ve played with The Subways, one of my favourite bands Pulled Apart By Horses, and Goo from Keighley, who I absolutely love. We’re playing with Yourcodenameis:milo at the end of this year, who are another of my favourite bands.

We’ve branched out into cities where previously we struggled to get a foot in the door, and I feel like we’ve really cemented the Ten Eighty Trees name on the UK grassroots music circuit more this year than ever before.

There’s a lot of mutual ambition within Ten Eighty Trees now, which is really nice, and it’s definitely showing fruit.

After those line-up changes, I basically decided I was going to do all the things I’d always felt I wasn’t allowed to do previously.

Which brings us nicely to Treevolution. Creating your own festival isn’t the usual next step for a band. Why did you decide the time was right to do it?

I’m not getting any younger, and I don’t want to live with the regret of not having done this, that or the other. One of those things was putting on our own festival, be it tiny or be it Glastonbury. I just wanted to do something.

Weirdly, one of the original reasons for doing Treevolution was that Ten Eighty Trees couldn’t get arrested on the festival circuit. So we thought, ‘Fine, we’ll put on our own festival. If nobody else wants to book us, we’ll do it ourselves.’

We started planning it in April 2025 and I think about a month later Kendal Calling got in touch. Suddenly it was, ‘Well, this kind of defeats the object of doing Treevolution because apparently we can get arrested!’

The irony.

But it was also about doing the things I hadn’t felt comfortable doing in the past. You only get to be in a band so many times before you run out of opportunities to do this stuff.

My friend Fred was managing a pub in Gateshead, which is my hometown, and asked if Ten Eighty Trees wanted to put on a show there. I said, ‘Not really. But would you be interested in us putting on a day festival?’

It snowballed from there.

We had an outdoor stage and an indoor stage, around 12 bands with no clashes so everybody could see everybody on the bill, and we made it pay-as-you-feel. It was a little bit cobbled together, but we made it work, and it was a fantastic day.

We got so much good feedback, including bands saying they’d love to be involved again, that we thought perhaps we should do it the following year too.

And Treevolution stayed in Gateshead. Was that important?

Very. We were adamant about keeping it in Gateshead.

There’s no easy way of saying this, but Gateshead doesn’t have a lot going for it in terms of venues and places for bands to play. There are definitely bands from Gateshead, but they’ll all play in Newcastle.

This year we approached venues in the Railway Quarter and everybody we asked was really keen. We got Station East involved, Microbus and then converted a football shirt shop, Bertie’s Shirts, into our third stage because Amy, who runs it, was dead keen to be involved.

We added another six bands to the bill, had a food vendor, MXG Sounds came down to interview the bands and one of our sponsors, the Glasgow podcast Music Is A Dead Scene, came down too.

We sold around 150 tickets and sold out three days before the event, which is kind of unheard of for a lot of events these days.

It was really good for Gateshead too. People were saying, ‘I didn’t know this part of Gateshead existed. This is really nice. I’m going to come back and visit these bars and pubs and this football shirt shop.’

I was like, ‘Brilliant. This is class.’

So what happens next to Treevolution? Are you able to tell us?

We’ve already started talking to the venues about next year.

We were much more proactive this time because we definitely left things a little late previously, and we’re hoping to have an outdoor stage next year, still in the Railway Quarter. We’re in the process of contacting Gateshead Council about that.

We’d also like to get a few more of the people and businesses in the Railway Quarter involved. There were places we could have included this year, but we simply ran out of time and staff.

So we’re looking to expand for next year, for sure. Watch this space for Treevolution 2027.

We haven’t actually posted anything about that yet. The Treevolution Instagram went a bit dormant after the festival because, to be honest, I was just knackered!

Fred did a lot of the liaison with venues and I was chronically online for about three months, contacting bands, sorting equipment and doing all the admin. There’s definitely scope to get more people involved next year so Fred and I aren’t running around like headless chickens quite as much.

Right, a couple of slightly less conventional questions. Treevolution 2027, or perhaps 2037. Money, geography and the laws of time no longer apply. Who are you booking?

The first one that comes to mind is keeping it very Gateshead-centric.

I’m really surprised AC/DC have never done a show at St James’ Park because they’re absolutely huge and Brian Johnson is from Dunston in Gateshead.

I would love to see AC/DC headlining Treevolution. Come and do your final ever UK show at Treevolution Festival. Wouldn’t that be nice?

Full circle, Brian. Love it.

And finally, back to ‘Always On’. You’re allowed to delete one completely normal part of modern life forever. Nothing enormous like war or poverty, just something that drives you insane. What goes?

It’s not very mundane or simple, unfortunately, but the first thing that comes to mind is I just want to delete data centres.

I think that would get rid of a lot of problems.

This [holds up mobile phone] isn’t good for communication. Picking up a phone, an analogue phone, one of those wired phones, that wouldn’t be the end of the world for me.

I think it might actually bring people closer together again, you know. Always looking to save the world.

There is new music, more live dates and, if those early conversations come together, an even bigger Treevolution already beginning to take shape for 2027. And on Nathan’s own request, go and listen to the new track, watch the videos and grab your tickets.

‘Always On’ – available now

Watch the official ‘Always On’ video

Ten Eighty Trees live at Veritas Festival, Anarchy Brewery, Newcastle – 7 November

Follow Treevolution Festival on Instagram for announcements about Treevolution 2027

29th September 2026