Are Lottery Winners really “the best band after the Smiths”?

At the time of the very first concerts in their Leigh, in Greater Manchester, they gave them 30 pounds, which they had to divide by four.

“I don’t know how we managed to go on. We really stayed, really poor for a long time. We continued because we believed it, but for many people this is not a realistic perspective », says the frontman Thom Rylance, who is the main voice in the band and also sounds the guitar. Today their latest album, “Koko”, is in the first place of the Official Charts Company, the weekly ranking of the best -selling albums in the United Kingdom. It is the second time that the group succeeds in the company, after the 2023 exploit with “Anxiety Replacement Therapy”: two years ago the National and Jassie Ware beat, this time they beat Selena Gomez and Benny Blanco and their “I Said I Love You First”, dethroned the phenomenon Playboi Carti and his “Music” and Sabrina Carpenter And his best-seller “Short n ‘Sweet”. They are the. Lottery Winners and they are the most popular and talked about the United Kingdom.

Thom Rylance set up the group together with Robert Lally (guitar and voice), Katie Lloyd (bass and voice) and Joe Singleton (percussion) in 2008.

Before the turning point two years ago, in the Lottery Winners’ career there was a fifteen -year apprenticeship. Of the name of the group they say: «We are very united as a band, we share all the ups and downs together since we were in the green and rented the equipment to play live. That’s why we called ourselves The Lottery Winners: it was an ironic name, of which we now repent. ” But he brought him luck. Because after waiting a lot, in the end they really won the lottery. The quartet signed his first record contract with the Sire Records in 2016, after the boss Seymour Stein, known to most to be the man who discovered and made a Star Madonna, called them “the best band since the Smiths times”, seeing sparkling Pop indie, priest and filling-pistans of their potential songs. Too bad that in 2018 Stein left the label. Moral: the Lottery Winners found themselves in a limbo from which they managed to go out only in 2020, when they signed a new record contract, this time with the independent label Briatnnica Modern Sky. Too bad that when the disc was ready to be sent to the shops and presented live a global pandemic broke out.

Rylance and associates were redone by building a very hard core of fans on social networks and on the net. Meanwhile, they have conquered fan of a certain level. Robbie Williams has fallen in love with their “You Again” to the point of asking him to open the dates of his new summer tour, which will also pass through Italy, on 17 July at the Nereo Rocco stadium in Trieste. Noel Gallagher offered to make him, jokingly, as a press office. “Koko” came out on March 21st. Among the myths of the frontman, who writes the songs and also produces them, there are Freddie Mercury, the Oasis and Nirvana, but the music of his Lottery Winners is definitely distant from that of these icons, and also from that of the Smiths: it is pop without too many frills, simple, radio-friendly (it is no coincidence that behind their boom there is a large push by radio stations by radio stations. British). It can remember the most pop Imagine Dragons.

“Koko” is an acronym for “Keep On Keeping On”, which sounds more or less like “continuing to go on”: Thom Rylance chose him to pay homage to his grandmother, who with that expression comforted him when he went badly to school. To those who start to put their heads out of the bedroom today they say: «This is for anyone who has a dream: you go out and come true. Do it happen ». They did so. Look where they arrived.