I want to be careful about the word "better" because it implies a trajectory that is always upward, and most careers don't follow that shape. But English Teacher keeps getting better, in a way that I find slightly unusual and very gratifying. Each new thing is more clearly itself than the last, which is a form of improvement that isn't about scale or ambition but about the arriving-at of something, the progressive clarification of what the band is and what it's trying to do.
Lily Fontaine's voice has become one of the most distinctive in contemporary British rock, and I mean distinctive in the precise sense of the word: you cannot mistake it for anyone else's voice, it has an identity that is entirely its own, it does things that other voices don't do. The particular relationship between her phrasing and the band's angular guitar work, the way the voice doesn't always follow the harmonic logic of the accompanying music, the way it sits slightly against the grain and makes the grain more interesting for the friction, is something I keep analysing in my head without arriving at a complete understanding of how it works.
The Leeds connection is not incidental. The city has a particular relationship with post-punk. Gang of Four, Delta 5, The Mekons emerged from the same geography in the late 1970s and left a legacy that subsequent generations have engaged with in ways ranging from explicit homage to unconscious absorption. English Teacher are clearly in conversation with that legacy, but they're not copying it. They've taken the intellectual rigour, the willingness to let awkwardness be productive, the sense that music can be about something that matters, and they've brought it into contact with their own specific moment.
The Awkward That Works
There is a quality in English Teacher's music that I've been trying to name for a while and keep landing on "productive awkwardness." Not the awkward of things that haven't yet been resolved, but the awkward of things that have been deliberately maintained at a stage before resolution, because the tension is where the meaning lives. Post-punk as a form has always understood this. The music that came after punk kept punk's refusal of easy pleasures while developing more sophisticated means of delivery. English Teacher is working in this tradition without being imprisoned by it.
What makes the current work feel developmental rather than static is that the awkwardness is becoming more precisely controlled. The early recordings had a quality of feeling through it, of not always being sure where the friction was supposed to be. Now it seems intentional from the first note. Fontaine's lyrics, which operate at an oblique angle to their own subjects, saying things around things rather than directly, using an associative rather than a linear logic, have the same quality of becoming more precise as the band gets more albums deep.
The Debut Album and What It Did
This Is Happening won English Teacher the Mercury Prize in 2024. That award matters not because prizes validate music, but because the conditions that produce a prize-winning Mercury album tell you something about the moment. The Mercury tends to reward British music that is formally adventurous without being inaccessible, emotionally engaged without being emotionally manipulative, and culturally specific without requiring insider knowledge to enjoy. English Teacher's debut hit all three.
The album's central preoccupation is consciousness under pressure, specifically the kind of cognitive and emotional pressure that comes from living a particular kind of early-adult life in a particular kind of contemporary Britain. Fontaine's lyrics circle this territory with the patience of someone who is not trying to resolve it but to understand it. The guitar work by Lewis Whiting provides a counterpoint that is intellectually rigorous rather than emotionally illustrative. The rhythm section anchors all of this in something physical, something felt in the body rather than only in the head.
The production, handled by the band themselves in collaboration with Jamie Lockhart, achieved something that debut albums rarely accomplish: it made the music sound exactly as strange as it needed to sound without making it sound difficult. This Is Happening is not easy listening. It is not hard listening either. It is precise listening, which is a different category entirely.
On Leeds and Post-Punk Lineage
The thing I find most interesting about English Teacher's relationship to the Leeds post-punk tradition is that they seem aware of it without being anxious about it. They're not trying to be Gang of Four. They're not trying not to be Gang of Four. They're just making the music they make, in the city they're in, with the influences they've absorbed, and the result is music that carries its city's musical history without being weighed down by it.
That relationship, unsentimental, genuinely engaged, is one of the healthier versions of a band dealing with its own inheritance. English Teacher is getting better. Leeds is lucky to have them. That is not a minor thing.
The record that keeps getting better is not a record that changes. It's a record that stays where it is while you develop the capacity to receive more of it. English Teacher's music rewards that development. Each listen brings new things in the structures, new meaning in the lyrical obliqueness, new understanding of why a particular rhythmic choice was made. That's what it means to be getting better. It means there's more in there than I've found yet.
I think about the particular pleasure of watching a band develop in real time, the ability to trace the decisions, to see how each record both resolves and opens questions, to feel yourself developing as a listener alongside the music. English Teacher offers that pleasure with unusual generosity. Each record is a chapter, and the chapters are building toward something I can feel but not yet see. That forward-leaning quality is what makes the present work feel important rather than merely good. Important means it matters to what comes next. I think this matters.
