walking upstream…
Oliver Tree
Oliver Tree Nickell grew up in Santa Cruz, California, playing in a middle-school ska band called Irony before moving through dubstep and electronic production and emerging in the late 2010s as an absurdist alt-pop performance artist. Built around a deadpan comic persona — bowl cut, oversized windbreakers, and a motorized scooter — his project fuses pop-punk hooks, hip-hop cadence, and electropop production with elaborate, self-mythologizing music videos. Breakout singles like 'Alien Boy,' 'Hurt,' and the streaming smashes 'Life Goes On' and 'Miss You' made him a fixture of 2020s internet-native pop, where the character and the music are inseparable.
the sound in question
2022
Miss YouOliver Tree
walk the tributaries ↓
Gorillaz2000s · Alternative rock / Electronic / Hip hop
Tree calls Gorillaz 'single-handedly the biggest inspiration for the Oliver Tree project,' pointing to Damon Albarn's cartoon-band blueprint as the model for building one cohesive, character-driven act out of clashing genres; he has said he 'leaned a lot from the blueprint developed by the Gorillaz,' who 'found ways to combine different styles and still make a cohesive project.'
listen: upstream & here
2001
Clint EastwoodGorillaz
2021
Life Goes OnOliver Tree
listen forThrow on 'Clint Eastwood' right before 'Life Goes On' — hear how both drape a downcast, sing-song hook over a genre-blurring track that slides between a hip-hop-cadenced verse and a melancholy pop chorus, the vocal delivered in-character rather than played straight.
blink-1821990s–2000s · Pop punk / Punk rock / Alternative rock
Tree grew up on blink-182 — of 'All the Small Things' he has said 'all the Blink-182 earworms seeped into my mind and somehow never left' — and later recorded a reworked version of his single 'Let Me Down' with the band he calls childhood heroes; their bratty, hook-first pop-punk surfaces in his snottier uptempo songs.
listen: upstream & here
1999
All the Small Thingsblink-182
2018
HurtOliver Tree
listen forPlay 'All the Small Things' into 'Hurt' — hear the same move of a half-shouted, snotty verse snapping into an oversized, fist-in-the-air pop-punk chorus you can yell back on the first listen.
David Bowie1970s · Art rock / Glam rock
Naming Bowie's 'Space Oddity' among his formative songs, Tree has said 'the way he developed his persona really influenced the Oliver Tree project heavily,' crediting Bowie's invented characters as a template for his own absurdist, self-mythologizing alter ego rather than a strictly musical borrowing.
listen: upstream & here
1969
Space OddityDavid Bowie
2018
Alien BoyOliver Tree
listen forCue 'Space Oddity' beside 'Alien Boy' — hear both narrate the singer as a lonely, spaced-out outsider character, a misfit drifting apart from the world around him, with the persona doing as much storytelling as the melody.