Earlier, we saw a band that has not as much as played a show since 2006 making their return with Million Dead. The very same year saw the foundation of Riding The Low, a band that has been steadily going strong for nearly 20 years and have blessed us with three full and diverse albums and are showing no signs of slowing down in a summer that see them conquering crowds at Download Festival, Kendal Calling and today at 2000trees.
I had the pleasure to speak to the two guitarists of Riding The Low, Chris Baldwin and Dan Baker, as they reflected on their short but impactful set in the Forest. Baldwin shared his thoughts on what he considered a somewhat of an interruption in proceedings. “Before we went on, someone was playing the most beautiful acoustic music with singer-songwriter sort of vibes. Incredible, very gentle, very pretty. We were going, ‘Are we gonna break this? We didn’t! And actually as the area filled up, there were lots of people with us, lots of people cheering and lots of people having a good time. So, yeah, it was a good set.”
Given their tenure, the band are far from stage shy and are well toured, but today’s setting is a rather unique one. “I don’t think we’ve played on one like that before,” Baker said of the beautiful Forest stage. “That’s a new thing. I think we’ve been in Woodlands before, done Kendal Calling in the Woodlands, but there’s something about that particular stage, it was very woody. The whole stage was sort of like a big shed, which is cool.”
With almost 20 years of history behind the band, plenty more than most can hope for, I was curious as to what has kept them going all this time. “Love for it, I think, ” Baker said. “It’s 19 years now, 20 next year. I think we’ve all fallen in love with the band more and more over the years, I would say. There’s a core four of us that have been throughout that whole time.
“We’ve had some different drummers over the time, but the rest of us have all been there the whole time. We just love it. We just love it. We believe in it. We believe in the songs, we believe in the records, we believe in the live shows. It’s as simple as that.”
Riding The Low pride themselves on their constantly evolving sound, impossible to box up into any one style or genre. Baldwin explained that with their identity, “There’s no quest. It’s actually about creativity and play and wanting to create every song as its own little world. I think that’s the best way to think of it.
“If you imagine every one of our songs is either a little world or a little movie. It is a melting pot. It’s all of these key influences coming together in a place which is Riding The Low. Paddy [Considine] has such a really strong vision of what this band is, and when the songs are kind of… it’s almost like they come back to us.
“So we will plant seeds and we will create jams and we will create riffs and sequences and then Paddy will live with them and then songs will come from that. When they come back into the room, we spend time with them. Some of them come quickly, some of them take a lot longer, some of them come on a live performance, and they’re kind of nearly there. So we put it into a set and then suddenly, Wow, there’s the song! I think the whole deal of it is that we are in love with the craft of songwriting more than anything else.”
Looking forward to what was in the works for the continually surprising band, Baker said, “There’s always new stuff in the works. So we’ve been recording. Actually, we haven’t tracked anything very recently as a band, but we’ve been working on stuff for the past… Well, actually, it’s pretty much indefinite, isn’t it? We just don’t stop.
“We just keep writing, recording all the time, and there’s always a new EP or a new album coming out. It’s never-ending. We have got albums stacked, not ready to go and recorded. We have the songs ready to go for multiple albums. Some of them are new stuff, some of them are songs that we’ve had for years and just never been realised, or we’ve never kind of found the home for them.
“So it’s just a case of us just getting through it. We do 90% of it ourselves now really don’t we? Chris does a lot of the work that way, Chris and Paddy do most of the stuff like that and Rich and I are, now Nat as well, will be tracking things as we go.”
Quizzing what sort of influences are inspiring their upcoming work, Baker said, “I think because we’re newly off the back of Download, there’s probably, I guess, like a heavier thing. Not saying that that’s gonna come out as being like a Metal thing at all. But there’s definitely an influence from all that stuff coming along the line.
“But there are all sorts of things in there. It’s constantly changing. One week, we’ll be talking about Deftones, for example, and then the week after, it will be REM. It could be anything, and that’s just natural to us.”
On the back of that recent heavy influence, Baldwin said, “Over the last few years, we’ve had a huge amount of support from the Manchester community and the indie crowd and all that sort of stuff. Where our journey seems to be taking us now is with rock and Metal.
“Not necessarily that we aren’t like a screamo band. We don’t do really heavy drop tunings or anything like that. But at the same time, we’ve got a kind of rock ethos and a rock energy. A quite heavy thing. I think that there area lot of people who find that they can connect to that side of us really, really well.
“The community around things like 2000trees, Download, they seem to be the communities that are embracing Riding The Low at the minute in a really great way.”
The five-piece are far from done with their summer tour. With a quick tour around the UK coming up at the back end of August and September, they are well worth a watch when they come to a town near you.
2000trees Festival is being held from 9–12 July 2025 at Upcote Farm, near Cheltenham, Gloucestershire. You can read all of MetalTalk’s 2025 coverage here.
