The Lottery Winners Prove Connection Still Matters at Kentish Town Forum
- Alan Bryce
- 11 minutes ago
- 4 min read
O2 Forum Kentish Town – 16 May 2026
IMAGES / WORDS ALAN BRYCE
It begins in that familiar pre-gig fug — outside the Forum, the air thick with something halfway between anticipation and static. Kentish Town on a Saturday night, all clattering pints and nicotine ghosts, everyone orbiting the same idea: something’s about to kick off, properly kick off. By the time I’m inside, the room feels like it’s already leaning forward.
Three bands, but it doesn’t feel like a stacked bill. It feels like a fuse being lit in stages.
The Tullamarines: Bright, Breathless, and Slightly Unhinged
The Tullamarines don’t waste time with introduction or posture, they arrive already in motion, like the first note is just a continuation of something that started backstage, or on a plane, or somewhere halfway across the world.
Their sound is immediate and kinetic, indie-pop that shimmers on the surface but has nerves underneath. You can hear the DNA, multiple voices braided together, not competing but colliding in ways that give the songs a kind of communal urgency.
Songs hit like jolts, bright, tuneful, but driven by a restlessness that stops them floating off into background noise. There’s always something pushing, something scratching at the edges.
What really lands is how alive they feel. No dead air, no passive moments. Guitars chatter, the rhythm section bounces, and there’s a sense they’re actively trying to win the room rather than assuming it’s theirs.
And it works. Slowly at first, nods, half-smiles, a few bodies moving, then more visibly.
By the time they leave, they’ve turned a room that was still arriving into one that’s already in it. That’s no small feat.
Tom A. Smith: Control, Confidence, and Something Brewing
Tom A. Smith shifts the dynamic. Where The Tullamarines flood the space, he narrows it. Everything tighter, more deliberate, more pointed.
You don’t get a perfectly preserved record of what he played, but the core is there: “Let’s Go Dancing”, “Our Song”, flashes of “Fashion”. Songs that feel built to punch through rather than drift.
He carries himself with that rare kind of confidence that doesn’t tip into arrogance. It’s not about showing off, it’s about claiming ground. Every movement, every note feels intentional.
The band behind him are locked in hard, giving the set a muscle that contrasts sharply with what came before. Where The Tullamarines danced, this drives. Even the quieter moments feel like they’re gathering force.
There’s a tipping point, subtle but undeniable, where the room snaps to attention. The chatter fades. People stop drifting back to the bar. He’s got them, properly.
By the time he walks off, it feels less like a support slot and more like a statement: remember this name.
The Lottery Winners: Chaos, Catharsis, and the Refusal to Be Cool
And then The Lottery Winners take the stage, and all sense of measured progression just disintegrates.
They open with “Worry,” which feels almost perversely apt. A band apparently built on joy kicking things off with anxiety. But within seconds, any tension in the room flips. Thom Rylance is everywhere at once. Talking, laughing, throwing out asides that should derail the momentum but somehow are the momentum.
This isn’t a performance in the traditional sense. It’s an overflow.
Songs like “Superpower” and “Sunshine” don’t just land, they expand, filling the room until there’s no space left between band and audience. They’re built like pop songs, sure, big choruses, clean hooks, but live they mutate into something louder, looser, more volatile.
“You Again” hits and suddenly the whole place becomes a choir, not in a tidy, rehearsed way, but in that ragged, full-throated manner where people are half-shouting, half-living through the words. It’s less about singing along and more about taking ownership.
And this is where it gets interesting, because what they’re doing shouldn’t work in 2026. There’s no ironic shield, no calculated distance, none of that knowing cool that indie music usually hides behind. They’re earnest. Bright. Open. Almost aggressively positive.
Yet in that refusal to play it cool, they find something sharper.
Because when you strip away the defence mechanisms (the irony, the detachment) all that’s left is feeling. And they double down on it. Triple down. Until the whole room is operating on the same emotional frequency, whether it wants to or not.
The band themselves are tighter than they need to be for a show this loose. Guitars cut clean through the noise, the rhythm section locks everything in place, allowing the chaos at the front, Thom’s scattergun charisma, the crowd’s unpredictable energy, to move without everything falling apart.
There are moments when it almost does tip, when the talking runs long, when the energy threatens to scatter, but that’s part of the appeal. You can feel the risk. And then, without warning, it snaps back into focus with another chorus, another surge.
“21” plays like a time capsule cracked open mid-gig, “Letter to Myself” pulls everything inward just enough to remind you there’s something real underneath all this brightness. And that contrast, that flicker between euphoria and vulnerability, stops the whole thing becoming one-note.
By the time they reach the encore, the room’s spent but unwilling to admit it. “Turn Around” feels like a last, defiant push, while “Burning House” lands softer, almost reflective, a comedown that doesn’t crash so much as settle.
Lights come up, and there’s that strange, hollowed-out feeling, like something’s been taken out of you and replaced with noise.
What sticks, walking back out into the night, isn’t just that The Lottery Winners were good, and they were, undeniably. It’s that they refused the easy route.
The Tullamarines sparked it. Tom A. Smith sharpened it. But The Lottery Winners took the whole idea of a gig, the distance, the cool, the separation, and smashed it into something communal, messy, and completely unguarded.
No poses. No masks.
Just connection, turned up loud enough to rattle the walls.
Epic.
SETLIST
Worry
Superpower
Sunshine
Let Me Down
Favoutire Flavour
Dirt and Gold (Live Debut)
You Again
21
UFO
Struggling
The Meaning of Life
Ragdoll
You’re Not Alone
Much Better
Letter To Myself
Start Again
ENCORE
Turn Around
BurningHouse
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