Released: 2023
Not for English Teacher’s lead singer Lily Fontaine the trap of emulating the moody nature of their band’s miserablist post punk forebears. Describing the Leeds quartet’s subsequently Mercury Prize winning debut album This Could Be Texas she revealed the desired effect for listeners as to “Feel like you’ve gone to space and it turns out it’s almost identical to Doncaster..it’s about inbetweens, it’s about home, and it’s about Desire Paths.”
Desire Paths might sound like another terrible Netflix series, but despite being labelled post punk in response to their profile building early single R&B, from the outset it was clear that Fontaine’s songwriting was elevated to a level way beyond the genre’s sometimes limited horizons.
This Could Be Texas as a result was an album or remarkable warmth, playability and depth, to the extent that in many other circumstances its spiritually uplifting closer Albert Road would’ve been the choice for any list. But if any track best matched the ambition of sketching the inbetween it was The World’s Biggest Paving Slab, a song about how you might feel if you lived in a flat pack town that had musical echoes of the space far outside it. Pointing the way to a bright future for the group, there were no traps here, only doors yet to be opened.
The Voice Of Unreason 