NOTION The Artists Vol. 1: English Teacher

After rocketing into the limelight, English Teacher are navigating the Wild West of life’s everyday absurdities. Here, this year’s Mercury Prize winners discuss their surrealist debut album, This Could Be Texas, understanding their sense of place and why Leeds will always be their home.

On a damp Thursday night in September at The Lexington-oneofLondon’sindie-kidcathedrals – a high-spirited congregation are celebrating a historic victory. That evening, it played host to the Mercury Prize afterparty for the fresh-faced winners, English Teacher.

For the Leeds-based four-piece, class is just getting started. This Could Be Texas, their Mercury Prize-winning debut album, is characterised by whip-smart humour, surrealist world-building, and perplexed protagonists navigating life’s everyday existentialism. The record, a vast unfurling tapestry of experimental instrumentation and political pinpointing in thirteen eloquent earworms, has propelled the quartet into the spotlight. From months of tumultuous touring to bagging this year’s award, they’ve had a groundbreaking 2024 but remain charmingly grounded.”

I’m pretty convinced that we’re living in a simulation at this point,” muses frontwoman Lily Fontaine on a video call, just back from their stint in the US supporting IDLES. Joined by two members of the band, Lily and bassist Nicholas Eden, both unsurprisingly weary-eyed, they’re both still taking in their meteoric rise. “We keep saying we need to write a new bucket list because it feels like we’ve ticked off everything we’ve ever wanted to do in one year,” she continues in disbelief. “It seems like everything we’ve aspired to, we’ve so far been able to achieve, so I’m definitely convinced that we’re living in a simulation.”

“It’s been a whirlwind. I’m still in utter disbelief,” Nicholas agrees, reflecting on the events of the past month alone. “I don’t think something like that will ever feel normal,” Lily affirms. And it’s no wonder the band can’t quite wrap their heads around the last 12 months. When the pair, accompanied by the band’s other half – guitarist Lewis Whiting and drummer Douglas Frost – were crowned the winners of the 2024 Mercury Prize, they broke a 10-year reign of London-centric winners. Reigning over some of this year’s most cultly followed albums, like The Last Dinner Party’s Prelude to Ecstasy and Brat by Charli xcx, it was a moment of trailblazing triumph that truly put them on the map.

Since the release of their political post-punk debut single ‘R&B’ in 202, the quartet have kept BBC 6 Music folks and young indie fans on their toes. After their first release, they broke through the chrysalis of indie rock and took flight in a unique avant-garde direction. This Could Be Texas is a sprawling masterclass in refined world-building and musical experimentalism. Ebbing through a palette of themes and intelligently weaving in literary references and poetic techniques, it’s an album that unearths new depths with each listen. With unpredictable time signature changes, unique social observations, infectious spoken-word passages, and surreal imagery, it’s a nourishing buffet of a record.

Produced and mixed by the legendary Marta Salogni, the album is genre-defying; it simply refuses to pick a lane. Melding indie, math-rock, prog-rock and folk-electronica, English Teacher are their own muse. “When do I have my best ideas? I don’t know,” Lily pauses. “Sometimes I go through serious periods of writer’s block. Smoking weed helps a lot. Half the album was written when I was stoned,” she continues. In light of the album’s absurdist lyrics, such a sentiment makes sense. Take, for example, lyrics from the track ‘Mastermind Specialism’: “I am the lamb you have for your tea and I am the tiger who came.” With wit and philosophy, Lily finds obscurity in the mundane.

Despite ticking off milestones at lightning speed and stepping into the more surrealist lyrical realms, English Teacher don’t shy away from being political. When asked about their Mercury win, they don’t sugarcoat it: “I mean, it’s a bit strange that it’s been 10 years. To me, it seems weird. It shouldn’t be a novelty – London is only a small part of a very big place.” Lily says. The media are wrapping up their victory as a win for regional music and a potential catalyst for change, but English Teacher aren’t so sure. “I don’t know how much it will do for Leeds. I hope that us winning helps organisations, like Music Leeds, get more funding.” As Lily says, such grassroots support and funding is essential for DIY music in the UK, “We received so much mentoring from Music Leeds and funding from ERS to record the first single”. Nick adds. Without this support, they wouldn’t have released a single, let alone end up signing to Island Records.

This sense of pace is what sets them apart from their peers, driven by a craving for evolution they’re blazing trails whether they mean to or not. The quartet’s earlier work, namely their EP Polyorchid, is rambunctious but straightforward by comparison to their full-length debut. Since then, they’ve leaned into their own realm of meandering melodies, such as in ‘You Blister My Paint’, and twinkly piano, as heard in ‘Not Everybody Gets to Go to Space’— all the while tying in their trademark propulsive spoken word, with something real to say. “I personally thought there was an oversaturation of scratch sound music. I wanted to sing more, and Doug was heavily into writing for piano – it’s his first instrument. So, both of those things happening at the time of writing our album might be why the sound leaned into a more balladry direction.”

As their frontwoman, Lily Fontaine’s unique voice lends a great deal of charm to the outfit. With such dexterity and control in her vocal delivery, she propels words with absolute precision as in ‘R&B’, yet the next minute melts into the soft and buttery register of ‘Sideboob’ and ‘You Blister My Paint’. All in her mellifluous Lancashire accent, of course. “I met Lily as a singer” Nicholas reminisces as we discuss the latter track, “and hearing her vocals on that one really pulled on my heartstrings. It still does.” Reciprocating the compliment, Lily smiles. “‘Nearly Daffodils’, which has the bassline Nick wrote, is one of my favourite songs on the album personally. I remember when I first heard that bassline, I was obsessed with it. I’m really proud of that song.”

It’s heartwarming to see a group with such earnest affection for one another, and perhaps that’s what makes English Teacher work so well. The push and pull between the surreal and the mundane in the band’s world could easily lend itself to a stranger name than ‘English Teacher’. It’s a name that brings to mind a somewhat tired and overworked face for many, but perhaps that’s exactly what makes it so brilliant. “Lily and I have English teachers in our family, and we all looked up to our English teachers in school,” Nicholas explains.

It’s a truth universally acknowledged that out of all the teachers, they often seem like the ones you want to impress, and the ones the creative amongst us are drawn to. When I ask them about their own English teachers growing up, they don’t hesitate. “The one I remember the most is Mr. Amis, from Year 8. I wrote an awful short story and showed it to him, seeking some sort of validation,” Nicholas shares. For Lily, “Sarah Crawley, my creative writing teacher at college. Then at school, Mr. Forsyth—he was sick. They’re the reason I discovered that I like writing and poetry.” Nicholas agrees, “My English teachers are how I discovered I liked words so much.”

Despite the album’s originality, it hasn’t avoided a heap of comparisons—everyone from Pulp to Portishead and even Parquet Courts have been mentioned in the same breath. But for the band, the holy trinity of inspiration is very apt. “I know we’ve all bonded over The Smiths and Radiohead,” Nicholas says, “but also, Black Country, New Road—they’ve definitely been a big one.” You can certainly spot the parallels, from Morrissey’s cynicism to the Thom Yorke-esque melodies. Similar to Black Country, New Road’s Live at Bush Hall album, there’s something beautifully theatrical about This Could Be Texas, but beyond that, there are layers of inspiration that supersede sonic connotations.

“I discovered the Romantics when I was in college, and their use of nature to talk about themes and feelings of awe was really inspirational. A lot of the songs are about the beauty of the landscape in juxtaposition with societal commentary,” Lily says. Having grown up in Colne, a market town in Lancashire’s rolling hills, the whole album is laced with nods to her home: a location she pays particular tribute to in ‘The World’s Biggest Paving Slab’, tying together dramatic landscapes with feelings of being an outsider that is very reminiscent of romantic literature.

Also noting the story of Frankenstein as a reference, Lily lyrically explores the feeling of not fitting in and the comfort found in natural landscapes. “Many of the album’s themes are about feeling like an inbetweener: stuck between decisions, between races, even being stuck between county lines,” she says. Thematically, the universe of English Teacher exists within a surrealism reminiscent of Salvador Dalí or Réne Magritte, from the landscapes painted in the lyrics to the lucid album artwork created by Lily herself. It also seems akin to the coming-of-age cult classic book, Submarine. “Joe Dunthorne, is one of my favourite poets,” Lily says, which makes sense. As a story that largely follows a lonely teenage boy’s woes and overactive imagination, a similar protagonist features in This Could Be Texas. Cemented in the album is the idea of belonging, meandering through space and place in both lyrics and arrangements. Colne, Leeds, and outer space all exist in the album. “Sense of place is something really important to me. Even though I write the lyrics, it’s not just something I can relate to; it’s something that all of us connect with,” Lily says.