Once one of our greatest cultural exports, British rock bands are facing a serious drought in the UK charts right now — but that could be about to change.
The Lottery Winners could be the guitar band to break the pop domination and fill that chart void with their newly released album Koko.
In 2023, they landed a breakthrough number-one album and are gunning to do the same but this time with the blessing of icons like Frank Turner, Morrissey, and even Oasis.
‘We’re a big deal now,’ lead singer Thom Rylance declares, grinning at Metro as he sits unassumingly in a Wetherspoons in Wigan for our call.
He might have been joking but the You Again hitmaker isn’t exactly wrong.
The Lottery Winners are your favourite band’s favourite band and if you haven’t heard of them yet, you’re definitely about to.
Thom and bassist Katie Lloyd confess the attention is all rather overwhelming, especially from their own personal heroes.
‘I have Noel Gallagher’s number, and Chad Kroeger FaceTimes me sometimes, and it’s weird,’ laughs Thom in disbelief.
The Nickelback legend is also featured on their new track Ragdoll and appears in the accompanying music video.
Success hasn’t happened overnight, though. Word of mouth has propelled The Lottery Winners into these circles 16 years into their career.
‘We’ve been doing it a long time,’ he continues. ‘We started off playing pubs in Leigh [Manchester] to literally no one and just loved it enough to sacrifice our entire social lives and finances to pursue music as a life and as a career.
‘Luckily, it worked out — we’re in a good position now where it’s working.’
The Lottery Winners — consisting of Thom, Katie, Robert Lally, and Joe Singleton — slogged for over a decade before getting signed in 2020.
Their debut self-titled album landed at number 23 in the UK charts, with the track Love Will Keep Us Together climbing to a similar spot on the singles chart.
It was three years later, with number one album Anxiety Replacement Therapy, that the band burst into more mainstream success, with the hitmakers calling it a ‘key that opened a door’.
Often the music comes from songwriter Thom’s struggles with mental health and ADHD, with a track on Koko simply titled Panic Attack.
He explains they ‘dressed it [up] with a kids choir and brass, and it’s all summery. There’s a juxtaposition of it being really melodic and quite nice and uplifting.
‘But if you actually peel it back a little bit, there is something darker. It feels like what I’ve had to do for years, which was masking those feelings.’
Returning to his cheeky demeanour, Thom adds that this was ‘very, very smart’ of his songwriting and should be appreciated as such, much to Katie’s amusement.
She teases that he has ‘all the ego’ the group could ever need, especially thanks to their newfound success.
However, ego is not the defining trait of The Lottery Winners’ music, the indie rock songs are much more honest and vulnerable than Thom’s cheeky persona would suggest.
‘I had to talk about things that I knew and things that were important to me.’ he shared. ‘If I can tell a song is disingenuous straight away, it doesn’t do anything for me. It just feels empty.’
It was only in the last few years, since his ADHD diagnosis, that Thom has begun to really address his mental health, having felt like a ‘broken or bad’ person for much of his life.
The Let Me Down singer recalled: ‘I got kicked out of two schools, didn’t really fit in anywhere, and I felt like the easy things that everybody could do, I just couldn’t. And I knew that I wasn’t stupid.
‘So someone said to me that I might have ADHD, and so I did a lot of research into…’
His wifi cut out here and Thom returned with the slightly baffling statement that ‘lemons sink but lime float’, which he promised was a ‘sick punchline’ — Katie looked unconvinced.
The Lottery Winners have spent the last few years touring with the likes of Noel Gallagher, Blossoms, and Nickelback.
Never sitting down for too long, Thom and the band have also just embarked on their own tour with a huge headlining gig at London’s O2 Shepherd’s Bush Empire.
In celebration of Koko’s release, the Burning House singers are also touring the UK throughout March and April with tickets on sale now.
They’re set to join Better Man legend Robbie Williams on his UK tour this year, with Thom ‘absolutely speechless’ at the opportunity.
‘This door opened,’ explained Thom. ‘Then all these cool, really famous people were just like, “Hey, come in, sit down. We’ve been waiting for you”.
‘It’s strange because we are around famous people a lot now, and outwardly act very cool about it, but inside just absolutely freaking out all the time.’
Katie, who lets Thom do most of the talking, simply shakes her head when asked about the sudden dizzying heights the group has reached.
While they may have the backing of some big names, The Lottery Winners were still ‘nervous’ to release Koko to the public — despite Thom ‘nearly leaking it 20 times’.
He confessed: ‘You feel really, really vulnerable. It’s really scary to put anything out into the world, like, “Look this is a piece of me and I really hope you like it, and if you don’t, I won’t be bothered but I will be really bothered and I’ll be dead upset about it.”‘
‘Someone once called us smile music,’ Katie added. ‘I really took that [to heart], it was so sweet.’
Thom agreed: ‘We’re just normal people but we’re getting to do this extraordinary thing, and we’re really grateful for it.’
The Lottery Winners’ new album KOKO is out now.
This article was first published on September 23, 2024.
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