S Poddar
Mercury Win for Leeds Band English Teacher Emphasizes Uncertain Future of Prize The Leeds band English Teacher, with their smart and kooky approach to music, made themselves winners of the 2024 Mercury Prize in a move that had many shocked-most of all, themselves. By betting odds, the favor had lain with more commercially active artists such as Charli XCX, and “Black Rainbows,” by Corinne Bailey Rae, was bold, at variance, and quite up there, too. But But This Could Be Texas by English Teacher won over the judges, in what was the first time an alt-rock band has taken the prize since Wolf Alice six years ago.
This Could Be Texas has a certain appeal in the great mixture of thoughtful lyrical content and unpredictable musicality. The band English Teacher approaches huge subjects like racism, inequality, and mental health but brings lightness and humor into the songs. Songs such as “The World’s Biggest Paving Slab” and “Nearly Daffodils” display a surreal, caustic wit unmistakably harking back to The Fall, but with immediacy and relatability not often seen.
Musically, it’s an album full of them, in fact. The melodies twist and turn in unexpected ways; there are proggy twists in time signatures, while folk, electronica, and garage-rock influences vie for space. Even the sense of space – dub-influenced, presumably – serves to make what’s eclectic sound cohesive. Whether serving up the plain emotional thump of a breakup song like “You Blister My Paint”, or begetting laughter, never is the music of English Teacher hard-wrought. Their weirdness is organic, authentic, rather than some contrived effort to be clever.
While the success of English Teacher was well-deserved, it has come at a time when the future of the Mercury Prize itself is hanging in the balance. It currently doesn’t have a sponsor, so the live ceremony was more low-key; co-presenter Annie Mac diplomatically referred to it as “an intimate celebration of this year’s shortlist.” This downsizing reflects a broader decline in media coverage and public interest. It feels, in retrospect, a world away from those days when the Mercury Prize was a lightning rod for debate: too populist, not populist enough, its scope too narrow, or so broad that comparing albums across it was near-on pointlessness.
Designed to help push album sales during a usually dormant period of the year, the Mercury Prize would appear to have lost much of its commercial force. Winners of 2023 Ezra Collective are an imaginative and powerful band, but their album Where I’m Meant to Be reached No 30 only fleetingly after last year’s ceremony, before vanishing from public sight.
The decline in influence of the prize may be due to a rise in streaming services, which in turn have greatly changed the way in which people discover and consume music. There is an almost limitless number of songs available to them, and algorithms actually curate recommendations suited to their taste. For instance, today’s listeners are less liable to rely on traditional tastemakers-the Mercury Prize being among them-to measure what is worth hearing. Its once unquestioned authority over musical value has been undermined, and fewer people are invested in the results.
Despite those challenges, there’s little doubting the quality of this year’s winner. This Could Be Texas is a remarkable album, as the Mercury winners of previous years have usually been worthy of their award. But given the current context, it’s difficult to see English Teacher’s win as anything other than either the first chapter of a new era for the prize or its final curtain call.
