Lessons from English Teachers

The British quartet releases a convincing debut album. The Leeds band shows a great ability in playing with pop, mixing it with various sound suggestions and managing to break away from easy labels.
“If the year is half as good as the last one, I will be happy,” said Lily Fontaine in 2022. Four years before her, she had met some peers at university who were interested in music like her, who had set their sights on writing songs when in 2016 she downloaded her GarageBand app onto her phone.

English teachers, however, were born in earnest precisely during the pandemic. In that period, perhaps as a reaction to the consequences of Brexit, many emerging groups allowed themselves to be conquered by the edgy rust of postpunk sounds. The Leeds quartet, formed by the drummer and pianist Douglas Frost, the bassist Nicholas Eden, the guitarist Lewis Whiting and, indeed, the singer and musician Fontaine, has declined the formula in the song R&Bprelude to the debut EP Polyawkward.

Released in 2022, the five-song album embraced arty solutions, spoken word, psychedelia, acid geometries and irresistibly captivating singing. But there was no shortage of sudden tempo changes, rapid scene reversals and a good dose of theatricality.

Produced by the local talent Marta Salogni, This Could Be Texas it’s a powerful debut. Fontaine has a talkative and ironic writing that recalls Alex Turner of the Arctic Monkeys: among his verses we wander women executed in the 17th century for witchcraft, a far-right terrorist arrested in 2006, actors, places that inspired Charlotte Bronte. It may happen that in the same verse you hear references to Nosferatu, Doctor Who, Orwellian “doublethink”, Le Carré, porn stars, William Blake, Shelley, Keats.

More generally, fragments that seem stolen from street chatter: “Steve’s friend’s son played in the Fall”, “I started whistling in the morning, “maybe the spotlight isn’t for me”, “have you heard regarding his wife who never made it to the altar?”. The English Teacher spread the album’s thirteen tracks on the daily newspaper of northern England, mapping their sonic territory with real places and faces, coloring it with fragments of pop culture and classic literature, intellectual wit and practical working class instinct.