Picture this: you’re sitting in the only remaining Georgian cloth hall in the world, waiting for the legendary new wave rockers, Squeeze, to appear on stage. Instead of embracing your picturesque surroundings, you’re glued to your phone. It’s the plight of the modern age. In my defence, there was some pretty big news about to be announced.

I lost count of how many times I refreshed the Official Charts website in the hope of hearing the news I’d been praying all week for. A few minutes after the hour, the page finally updated, and it was confirmed.

The K’s had taken Pretty On the Internet, their second album, to number one.

For some artists, this would mean nothing; today, the charts are increasingly easy to predict. Each major release seems to get to the top in its first week – even the so-called ‘alternative’ options like Wet Leg, Sam Fender and The Last Dinner Party can be pretty much guaranteed a debut in that enviable spot. But for a band like The K’s, it means so much more.

“Few can live up to the sheer grit and hard work that The K’s put in”

Release week, for any band, is one of the busiest times that they will face. Instores, outstores, signings and everything in between have become standard for many. Yet few can live up to the sheer grit and hard work that The K’s put into that first week of August. Alongside months of signings and instore performances across the country leading up to release day, they managed to visit their pop-up shop in Newton-le-Willows daily, while touring HMV stores and making appearances at various festivals across the weekend. They were doing everything that they could to avoid a repeat of what happened to their last album.

I Wonder If the World Knows is a true work of art. Long-established artists would envy the euphoric heights of songs like ‘Chancer’ and the touching beauty of more sedate tracks like ‘Valley One’. But its release on the fifth of April 2024 sadly coincided with the release of The Libertines’ All Quiet On the Eastern Esplanade, another career-defining masterpiece. Both albums deserved to get to number one, and both bands worked their socks off to get there. In the end, The Libertines won thanks to their more established following, but The K’s should have been able to accept a very respectable second place. And they did — at least, on every chart recording sales. Once streaming was counted, however, they were knocked down to third.

“Bands like The K’s … have to galvanize their fans to actively participate in the chart race”

The week before had seen the release of Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter which received major mainstream coverage and much promotion simply through her established fame. In her first week, she made it to number one across streaming and sales charts. Her established status meant that she had no need for pop-up shops or instore appearances. But whereas Beyoncé can gain a chart position through her fans’ passive consumption due to her prominence on streaming playlists, bands like The K’s and even The Libertines have to galvanize their fans to actively participate in the chart race. The K’s outsold Beyoncé in every other chart, but she elbowed them out of the way to claim second place that week.

I suppose you may ask why any of this matters? Some of the greatest albums never made it to number one. Out of their four studio albums, The Smiths only ever managed to get Meat Is Murder to the top, and yet it is The Queen Is Dead and Strangeways Here We Come that are often upheld as the band’s masterpieces. None of Bowie’s first four albums (including The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars and Hunky Dory) made it to the top.

But times have changed. Though we’re still impressed by anyone who can claim a number one album, how many of us (who aren’t massive geeks like me) can claim that they actively follow the charts? Even I only check it when there’s a band that I actually like in contention. I know that, after a week, they’ll have been cleared out by the few new releases that can squeeze in between the constants like Taylor Swift, ABBA, and Fleetwood Mac, who never seem to disappear. We only care for the number one spot, because the rest is packed with more of the same, over and over.

What the success of The K’s proves is that there is still life, if not in the charts, then at least in the independent music scene. These four lads from Earlestown beat back competition from Paul Weller’s new album and Oasis’ entirely (un-) just resurgence to prove that hard work and passion are still present in the independent scene and still pay off.