Consequence’s Rookie of the Year

Our 2024 Annual Report continues as we proclaim UK band English Teacher our Rookie of the Year. Make sure to also check out our list of the 50 Best Albums of 2024, which features English Teacher’s This Could Be Texas.

Consequence’s 2024 Annual Report is presented by Amazon Music. You can get three free months of Amazon Music Unlimited, with access to over 100 million songs in HD sound, the largest catalog of ad-free podcasts, and now audiobooks from Audible, by signing up here.

There’s no roadmap to success for a young band, so the quartet of English Teacher drew it up themselves. Charting their own course out of Leeds, UK, their sublime This Could Be Texas debut features fearlessly experimental songwriting, virtuosic musicianship, and a passionate blend of the widescreen and the intimate.

Arriving back in April, the album earned the band our CoSign accolade, and stuck with us long enough to well warrant them being our Rookie of the Year. The LP was quite the eclectic sampler — “sketchbook-y,” as the band describes it — and yet, its confident offerings captured the attention of a global audience. Having freshly concluded back-to-back UK and European tours, guitarist Lewis Whiting and drummer Douglas Frost are only just beginning to catch their breath and appreciate all the success that audacious collection has brought them.

“We’ve had maybe a couple of days in between, and now, as the year winds down, it feels like we’re finally getting a second to reflect,” Whiting says over a video call.

Following weeks of playing This Could Be Texas night after night, country after country, Frost confesses they’re beginning to enjoy the album again. “Recording and writing the album was actually quite stressful,” he says, “But now, with everything that’s happened — like accolades like this — I feel like I’ve come full circle and can let myself love the music again.”

English Teacher, photo by Tatiana Pozuelo

And this is not the only accolade they’ve received: English Teacher took home the 2024 Mercury Prize, which honors the best album made by an artist or group from the UK or Ireland. According to Whiting, they would have had “the best night ever” even to just be nominated for the prestigious award; the fact that they went on to win it was just icing on the cake. “It was such a dream of ours to win that prize, to be even be nominated… it was an incredible honor,” Whiting says. Frost agrees, adding, “We gave a lot to the album, so it really means a lot. It felt quite nice to have that tick from everyone to be like, ‘Yeah, this album is good.’”

That validation certainly felt hard-earned for the group, who are rounded out by vocalist Lily Fontaine and bassist Nicholas Eden. They had spent years attempting to break out from their Leeds-based music scene, having formed just before the pandemic hit. Inspired by the then-burgeoning Windmill scene in London (which spawned bands like Squid, black midi, and Black Country, New Road), that era of uncertainty would serve as a gestation period for what English Teacher would eventually become.

They didn’t just upload their music online and hope for a viral moment would be born, however. Instead, they leaned on the existing infrastructure of their university, Leeds Conservatoire to help their career take its first steps. “There was this organization called Music:Leeds, led by this man called ‘Whiskers’ and then Scott Lewis,” Frost tells Consequence. “We applied and won some funding from PRS (a music publishing coalition in England). Then, through Music:Leeds, Scott became a mentor for a few months. He taught us how to write press releases, apply for more funding, and pitch to labels.”

Whiting says that it was that PRS grant that allowed English Teacher to record their 2021 debut single, “R&B.” “That first blast of exposure was what started the chain reaction of everything, so without them backing us really early on and giving us that funding, we wouldn’t be here.”