There are few things that can threaten to tear a band of brothers apart.

One is having the surname Gallagher. Another is falling foul of the age-old scourge that befell many who came before them: that concussive collision where the irresistible force of the idealistic artist meets the immovable object of the cold, unfeeling music business. And that’s exactly what happened to righteous indie godheads The Cribs, the band made up of Wakefield-born twins Ryan and Gary and their younger brother Ross Jarman, over the most difficult two years in the band’s career.

The band’s struggle was a time bomb that went off just as their Steve Albini-engineered album ’24-7 Rock Star Shit’ hit the shelves in August 2017. That record, the band’s harshest and most abrasive to date, was a ‘surprise’ release that started out as a few tracks recorded at Albini’s Electrical Audio studio in Chicago and eventually grew to a full-length album. It was a gear-change for the band, who decided to release it directly to the fans, with very little advance notice. “We chose that approach so that there would be no pressure on it, because we knew that it wasn’t really a commercial record,” says Ryan.

But beyond the method of release – no press, no radio, no big build-up – the real surprise was how it was lapped up by fans new and old. 24-7 Rock Star Shit placed at Number One in the midweek charts, and landed at Number Eight – the band’s highest chart placing in a run of seven consistently excellent LP’s beginning with their 2004 debut – and their fourth consecutive UK Top 10 album.

However, in what should have been a week of celebration at this against-the-odds success, tension in the Cribs camp was about to reach a head. The decidedly DIY smash-and-grab approach of the album’s launch had exacerbated frictions that ultimately proved irreconcilable and, smack in the middle of release week, the band parted ways with their longtime UK management, who had guided their career since the band’s earliest days. “It blindsided us, and it really took the wind out of our sails,” says Gary. “And now, looking back, that was the start of a whole load of shit.”

Picking up management duties themselves, the band began the painful process of unpicking their accounts and past contracts, discovering that “nothing was really as it seemed – we didn’t even know who owned the rights to the songs”.

“It’s a classic story, like, you read any old school music biography and it’s always, ‘Oh, we didn’t realise that this was going on, we didn’t realise our rights had been sold to somebody else,’” says Ryan. “And, you know, you don’t think that could still happen now, because it’s so cliched. But essentially, that was exactly what happened to us.”