When Casey Mattson was a teenager in Santa Cruz, California, his friend Oliver Tree Nickell told him that, one day, he was going to shoot a music video where he drove a monster truck. At this point, Mattson and Nickell were making avant-garde electronic music at their parents' houses, sometimes for days at a time with no sleep, and though Oliver had already achieved some real success, particularly for someone under 18—he'd been the DJ opener for Skrillex and Zeds Dead—Mattson didn't believe him. They were just kids.
As the years passed, however, Mattson watched his old pal fail and rise, and something became clear to him: Much of what Oliver said became true, as if he had developed a supernatural power to will things into existence.
Nearly a decade later, after striking a deal with Atlantic Records, the 25-year-old, who now goes by the stage name "Oliver Tree," got to drive the vehicle of his dreams in his first major video. "All That x Alien Boy," a combination of songs off his first EP, Alien Boy, is a sort of electronic rap ballad hybrid that rapidly shifts tempos and beats, and also features our lead man prancing atop a white horse, speeding through the desert on a pocket rocket, and hoisting a bazooka.
Since 2016, Oliver has been this alien boy—a figure that exists somewhere between an actual musician and an online comedian, a surreal filmmaker and a troll for viral content. An early step was calling up his childhood friend Mattson to be the keyboardist in his band. But there was a condition—Mattson would have to take part in the entire endeavor, in how they would act as artists. Simply put, Oliver Tree would turn himself into a meme, over and over again.
This, he assured me, was only the beginning. He had promptly begun dressing in a multicolored 80s windbreaker, JNCO jeans, and sandals (his feet in socks, of course), the look topped off with a bowl cut. Mattson, meanwhile, would don a long wig, as if he had the hair of a Neanderthal, and, embodying the persona of the fictional "Ronnie G.," serve as Oliver's relatively silent sidekick and foil.
"I'm just trying to be the ugly Justin Bieber," Oliver told me, laughing. The confusion he has been presenting to the world since the start of his transformation actually boils down to a single question: What happens when you're forced to take a joke seriously?
It's as if Oliver is reverse-engineering the path of the social media star. His career works in contrast to someone like Instagram's Roy Purdy, who is slowly using the notoriety from his high school dancing and pro-level skating videos to build a broad entertainment career (he recently signed with CAA), or Supreme Patty, who is squirting lemon juice in his eyes for professional aspirations, or 6ix9ine, who's online gangster persona turned him (almost) into an actual gangster. Oliver Tree is operating backwards. His music came first. If this is what he has to do to get noticed, to blow up, he's fine with it.
"You'll just have to keep following the crumbs," he said, before he climbed the steps onto the stage and did a 360 on his scooter. I told him I would keep my eyes peeled—even if I didn't know quite what I should be looking for.
Eventually, about halfway through the gig, I leaned over to a security guard standing near the barricade to the pit and asked him, in so many words, what he thought, and if he was aware of what was going on.
"I don't know, man," he said, shrugging. "But the kid has some hooks."
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All portraits by Michael Marcelle. Follow him on Instagram.
All performance shots by Monet Lucki. Follow her on Instagram.
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