English Teacher win 2024 Mercury Prize

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English Teacher live at Leeds Festival 2023 (Gary Mather)

English Teacher beat competition from the likes of Charli XCX and The Last Dinner Party.

English Teacher won the 2024 Mercury Prize last night thanks to their debut album This Could Be Texas.

Despite a scaled back ceremony at Abbey Road which has called into question the future of the prestigious award, nothing could take away from the achievement for a band made of the Leeds independent scene which went on to release won of the highest acclaimed records of the year.

Named as Live4ever’s album of 2024 at the halfway point, we praised This Could Be Texas for signposting, ‘a hundred exciting, different futures’, after first talking with the band during the early days of June 2021.

Fontaine writes from the perspective of someone who is sharing for love, rather than soft power over her audience. On Mastermind Specialism she explores the act of not taking a decision as a decision of itself, the narrative arcing back to her own nomadic existence, the narrative one of serially breaking up with chunks of your own life.

“There are other breakups too, such as the one exposed on the proggy motorik Nearly Daffodils, a broken-up song with a lamenting overtone: ‘You can lead water to the daffodils/but you can’t make them drink.’”