BBC Sound of 2025: Indie band English Teacher kick off list at number five

One of the UK’s most promising new guitar bands, English Teacher, have kicked off the countdown of the top five on the BBC’s annual list of music’s rising stars.

The Leeds quartet have been voted in fifth place in BBC Radio 1’s Sound of 2025 poll – with a panel of 180 music industry experts choosing them as one of the acts with “the best chance of mainstream success” in the next 12 months.

They got well on their way last year. In September, the band beat pop stars like Charli XCX and CMAT to win the Mercury Prize for their debut album, This Could Be Texas.

The record deals in sharp portraits of life in sleepy northern towns, where the background hum of racism, loneliness and deprivation is thrown into sharp relief by sublime scenery and lifelong friendships.

Their music, meanwhile, is constantly surprising – full of shifting time signatures, needle-point guitar riffs and soaring melodies that are simultaneously odd and captivating.

“We never really set out with an aim to create something specific,” says guitarist Lewis Whiting. “But, that’s the fun part, right? Trying to make something new and interesting.”

They say the acclaim they’ve received so far still doesn’t feel real. “Where we come from, this just doesn’t happen,” says frontwoman Lily Fontaine.

“I keep telling people that I feel like I’m living in a simulation.”

“It does feel dream-like,” adds Whiting.

“Best year of my life, craziest year of my life.”

Over the last 12 months, the group have played more than 100 gigs in 16 countries, rising steadily up festival bills as they go, and surviving on “willpower, laughter and Red Bull”.

Along the way, they told journalists their origin story more times than they care to count. Eventually, they got tired of the “boring” reality (they met studying music at Leeds Conservatoire) and started inventing less prosaic stories.

“We said we were distant relatives who met at a wedding 20 years ago in Leeds,” laughs Fontaine.

“They put us at the odd table. We were sort of like the outcasts,” adds Whiting, continuing the story.

“But we really clicked,” says Fontaine. “We started talking about Shakira and how we wanted to be like her, then they played Hips Don’t Lie at the disco and we said, ‘We should start a band’.”

English Teacher, it should be noted, sound nothing like Shakira. They started out as a dream-pop outfit called Frank and, after the addition of Whiting on guitar, began to lean into a more angular, post-punk sound.

Key references include Radiohead, Sonic Youth and Pavement. “But, famously, we don’t agree on our favourite bands,” says Whiting.

The quartet released their first single, The World’s Biggest Paving Slab, in 2020.

Like many of their songs, it draws inspiration from Fontaine’s hometown of Colne in Lancashire, where the titular paving stone resides outside the town hall.

The lyrics reference a host of local heroes – from Life On Mars actor John Simm to novelist Charlotte Bronte – juxtaposing the colour and vigour of the town’s history against the social problems it faces in the current day.

It’s an itch she continues to scratch throughout the band’s catalogue, addressing social deprivation and political mismanagement (“Can the river stop its banks from bursting? / Blame the council, not the rain“) alongside themes of identity, self-doubt and emotional turbulence.

Incredibly, she only started writing relatively recently. As a teenager, she’d been in a wedding band with her friend, playing Amy Winehouse and Adele covers. She didn’t consider composing until she applied for university.

“I wrote my first song for the audition,” she recalls. “It was awful, but it worked. I got a place to study singing and performance, but I very quickly switched to composition, because I was suddenly spending all my time writing songs.”

During that period, English Teacher’s members – completed by drummer Douglas Frost and bassist Nicholas Eden – circled each other on Leeds’ live music scene, playing with various other bands before settling on their current line-up.

Their breakthrough came with the 2021 single R&B, where Fontaine addresses the challenge of being a woman of colour fronting an indie band: (“Despite appearances, I haven’t got the voice for R&B“).

It’s a perception she struggled with herself as a teenager, frustrated that she wasn’t capable of “the kind of the vocal runs that the black singers I looked up to were able to do”.

As a frontwoman, she developed her own style – a droll mixture of sprechgesang and her fluttering, airy upper register. But she still encountered prejudice.

“There’d be times where I told people that I made music, and they’d give a certain expression when I said that it was guitar music or it was indie music,” she says.

“There were a lot of small comments after gigs. People would come up and say, ‘Oh, that’s not what I was expecting at all’,” adds Whiting.

Fontaine is careful not to make too big an issue of it. “I think I’ve got a lot of privilege, because I’m quite a light skinned woman of colour,” she says.

“I think if I was dark skinned it would be even harder – but it did affect me, not seeing people who looked like me in bands.

“I think it made me start a band later in life. Maybe I would have started when I was a teenager, and not when I was leaving university.”

English Teacher’s early songs gained an audience during the first wave of the Covid pandemic – which meant they didn’t get to play a gig together until the lockdown ended.

Their first show was as part of an all-day mini festival in May 2021, where the audience still had to be seated and socially distanced.

“Those first gigs were kind of jarring,” Whiting recalls. “It was quite strange because everything up ’til then felt very online, which doesn’t feel as tangible. And then when you go and play a gig, it’s like, ‘Yeah, this is actually going somewhere.'”

“We were so nervous, too,” says Fontaine. “I feel like it was only late into 2023 that we really found our confidence.”

By that point, they were deep into recording their debut album with Italian producer Marta Salogni (Bjork, Depeche Mode, MIA) – including new, more polished versions of R&B and The World’s Biggest Paving Slab.

The band say they put “immense pressure” on themselves to perfect the record, fixating on its push-pull dynamics, adding extra layers of context, and experimenting with new instruments.

“It was an intense time in our personal lives, trying to get it finished and out. We gave a lot to it,” says Whiting.

“Recording your first album is just a huge opportunity,” continues Fontaine. “I think we were very aware of that.”

The hard work paid off.

Record Collector Magazine called This Could Be Texas “one of the most confident and charismatic debuts in years”. The Mercury Prize judges said the band’s “winning lyrical mix of surrealism and social observation… displays a fresh approach to the traditional guitar band format”.

The quartet are endearingly amazed that anyone paid attention at all.

“I wasn’t sure that it would connect with people, because the lyrics are quite specific to the area I grew up in,” says Fontaine.

Instead, it was the bigger themes – of leaving home and finding your place in a world that’s “going up in flames” – that helped them find an ever-growing audience.

On The World’s Biggest Paving Slab, Fontaine mockingly describes herself as “the world’s smallest celebrity” – a lyric that’s rapidly becoming obsolete.

“I’m not the smallest, but certainly not the biggest,” she laughs.

“In the alphabet of celebrity, I’m probably on the X-list.”

One act from the BBC Sound of 2025 top five will be revealed on Radio 1 and BBC News every day this week, culminating with the winner on Friday.