English Teacher has gained a lot of -well deserved- attention since their album This Could Be Texas won the Mercury Prize. This win, beyond celebrating an excellent contribution to contemporary music, questions a contemporary cultural problem in Britain: people being left behind. The Leeds-based quartet masterfully explores how the UK’s worrying socio-economic state impacts people and chose to do so by doubling down on their local roots and their resulting perspective. Arguably, the choice to focus on the local and personal made English Teacher’s music able to strike a popular chord, which helped them win the Mercury Prize, a prize that has been exclusively awarded to London-based artists for nearly a decade. Their win shows that questioning the London-centric culture is important to people right now and why it’s importance to address local, socio-economic, and health-based disparities.

This Could Be Texas addresses all these problems by focusing on recreating an average person’s gaze. English Teacher do so both on a sonic and on a lyrical level. The distorted, slightly off-beat feeling is perfectly produced to sound like the feeling of being frozen whilst staring at a car-crash in slow-motion. The sound builds and drops throughout each song as the instrumentation oscillates between a singular instrument being the main sound to a complex experience, creating a dystopian feel. This layering causes these unresolved builds in the music, creating a sound that feels both painfully nostalgic and full of tension. This sound is built on by Lily Fontaine’s vocal choices. Fontaine keeps switching between singing and talking, creating a distinction between thoughts and speech. This stylistic choice creates an inner stream of consciousness exists fuelling what Fontaine ends up ‘saying’ during the songs. This creates a layered perspective that feels intimate, specific, and person(al), thereby allowing the listener to relate to the experience of thinking, talking, and reacting to living right now.

By speaking to the human experience of ‘almost’, of ‘nearly’, of ‘could’, English Teacher’s lyrics explore the experience of post disappointment. The album explores the experience of how a person deals with being worn down and let down to the point they feel stuck, detached, and lonely. This Could Be Texas goes through this process of being consumed by this dull heaviness and how people pick painful feelings apart to try and find something to hold onto, to romanticise and to reasonably give justify the emotional turmoil. This album is ultimately driven by the tension that exists within the paradox of trying to deal with everything you want seeming -just- out of reach.

The first track, ‘Albatross’, sets up this tension by having Fontaine try to understand her identity within her feelings of irrelevancy. Fontaine references Coleridge’s poem, ‘The Rime of The Ancient Mariner’ to try to understand herself. The lyrics “don’t think you're special” and “she’s not the only one…there’s millions of them” demonstrates what happens when you investigate your personal negative self-image for meaning. Fontaine uses the Albatross as her cultural anchor beyond Coleridge to also reference her feelings of irrelevancy within the musical space. There are countless songs titled ‘Albatross’, from Taylor Swift to Fleetwood Mac to Corrosions of Conformity to Cola to The Foals. Fontaine exploring feeling pointless by using a metaphor that has been used in the artistic mainstream emphasises the meaninglessness she feels. This song establishes the tension between the romantic and the mundane and sets up the cyclical nature to how these two factors feed into each other in the album.

This feeling of futility in battling the post disappointment continues in tracks like ‘Nearly Daffodils’, ‘Not Everybody Gets To Go To Space’ and ‘I’m Not Crying, You’re Crying’. Lyrics like “I’m not ready, I’m not steady” and “Not everybody gets to go to space, you can’t change it...because if everybody got to go to space, No-one would ever want to clean” further comments on person’s experiences. The continuous reminder that some people are forced to carry on and deal with being unhappy presents both an opportunity for commiseration and a challenge to listeners. This Could Be Texas pushes people to either question these experiences and allow listeners to be angry whilst creating a space to allow people to wallow and ruminate. By focusing on things that feel just out of reach, This Could Be Texas creates space for people to react differently through every listen to the same national tension.

Understanding how the socio-economic breakdown translates to people’s daily lives can best be understood in ‘Broken Biscuits’. The imagery of crumbling biscuits, something common that cannot be put back together is used to unpack how people have been impacted. The lyrics “Shoes were brought broken in, one new pair breaks the bank…Mum’s bones are breaking…splitting our prescriptions…broken biscuits” feels relevant to how the national economic disparity has impacted the chronic health crisis in the UK.

Amongst all the grim realisations throughout the album, a romantic thread keeps the complex tension going to fuel the underlying frustration as seen in songs like ‘The Biggest Paving Slab’, ‘The Best Tears of Your Life’ and ‘R&B’. ‘The Best Tears of Your Life’ plays on the phrase ‘the best years of your life’ adds to this distorted tension of what could have been and what the reality Fontaine explores is like. ‘R&B’s’ opening line “Got a taste of what it feels like to be close enough” demonstrates the nature of psychosomatic pain that comes from wanting something more in this climate. ‘In The Biggest Paving Slab’, references to Romantic artists, northern celebrities, and the northern landscape in contrast with the infamous Pendle Witches and the Talbot Street Terrorists allows people to feel the potential alongside what crushes it down to illicit a reaction. “I’m the world’s biggest paving slab, and the world’s smallest celebrity” further plays into the duality that exists in the post disappointment. English Teacher explores these elements of potential within their local identity to unpack the anger and want that comes after being left behind.

This Could Be Texas’ entire messaging has been summed up in the title track “I put it in a postbox, Someone puts it in your home, And that house is in a town, That town ain’t far from here, But it doesn’t feel very near… And that town is in a state, And that state is in a country, And that country is in a bad state.”. Addressing the dehumanisation and trauma people battle through from a personal perspective reassigns the blame back onto structural failures to demonstrate why – and what – change is needed.