The K's: 'I try not to dress anything up, to be raw with what I’m writing'

His band The K’s have spent the past few days playing to large crowds at festivals in the Isle of Wight and the Netherlands and are preparing for a gig in Berlin on the day we speak. “We’re tired but it’s all good,” he says cheerfully.

In April the indie rock group from Earlestown in Merseyside reached the top five of the UK charts with their debut album I Wonder If The World Knows? and this summer they are on the festival trail with appearances at Leeds and Reading over the weekend of August 23-25 followed by a headline slot at This Feeling By The Sea in Bridlington on September 7.

Of Leeds and Reading, Boyle says: “It’s going to be one of the highlights, for sure. We’ve played the main stage before but then we opened it, now we’re on fourth, so I think it just shows the progression, now we’re playing these later afternoon slots.”

Some of The K’s earliest gigs were promoted by This Feeling, who specialise in working with young guitar groups, and Boyle says the relationship is ongoing. “We work with a few different promoters but This Feeling are still a very big part of everything we do.

“We’ve always loved working with them, they’re like personal friends of ours, we’ve been doing it for that many years. They’re just really good guys and we like working with them, so to headline their festival as well, we’re just buzzing for it.”

Success for the four-piece has been a while in coming. Back in 2020 they were poised to sign a record deal then the Covid pandemic happened and the offers were withdrawn. Caught up in an industry backlog, they went through “a bit of a transition period that went on for a couple of years”.

The arrival of new drummer Nathan Peers along with a booking agent made them “really focus on the live side” and releasing new music was put on the back burner.

“Our new management were like, ‘you’re absolutely smashing it live and it’s not reflected in the music that you’re releasing because so sporadic, so few and far between’, so they made a bit of a plan for us and showed us what we’re supposed to be doing,” Boyle says.

“And the next thing we’d signed a deal, we’re releasing an album, we got to number three (in the charts) and we’re in talks about album two now, which is going to go to number one.

Boyle, who is the band’s principal songwriter – “I write the tunes and then Ryan (Breslin, his long-time friend) writes the guitar parts,” he explains – describes his writing style as “very honest, very to-the-point, I don’t really wrap stuff up too much”.

“I’m maybe too honest sometimes to the point where I sometimes feel a little bit embarrassed but I try not to dress anything up, to be raw with what I’m writing, I write exactly what I’m feeling at the time and I feel like people relate to it because it’s just raw and real.”

This Feeling By The Sea runs at Bridlington Spa from September 6-7. https://thisfeeling.co.uk/bythesea/