English Teacher are worthy Mercury winners – but the question of the prize’s future hangs heavy

The members of Leeds quartet English Teacher looked understandably startled to have won the 2024 Mercury prize. The bookies – who invariably go for the most commercially successful album – thought it would be Charli xcx, while the smart money was probably on Corinne Bailey Rae’s daringly eclectic Black Rainbows. It’s a long time since an alt-rock band won the prize – the last was Wolf Alice six years ago – but you can see why the judges were charmed by This Could Be Texas.

In a world of heavy-handed sermonising, the lyrics deal with serious topics – racism, inequality, mental health, penury – with a light touch, sharp, smart and funny in equal measure; you can detect the faint ghost of the Fall in the surrealism and caustic wit of The World’s Biggest Paving Slab or Nearly Daffodils.

The music, meanwhile, seems to delight in continually throwing the listener curveballs; the melodies twist and turn in unexpected ways, there are proggy shifts in time signature, a folky bent coexists with electronica, garage-rock guitar riffs, what seems to be a dub-influenced sense of space.

It can be straightforwardly emotive – as on the break-up song You Blister My Paint – or it can make you laugh out loud. Perhaps most importantly, it never feels like it’s going out of its way to be quirky or clever. Its strangeness feels like natural expression, rather than trying too hard.

It takes nothing away from the album’s quality to suggest that whoever won would be overshadowed by the question of the Mercury prize’s future. It no longer has a sponsor, necessitating a scaling-back of the live ceremony to what co-presenter Annie Mac tactfully described as “an intimate celebration of this year’s shortlist”.

Media coverage has dwindled, although – at risk of sounding waspish – not quite as dramatically as public interest seems to have done; even the days when the Mercury was the subject of constant criticism – too populist, insufficiently populist, too narrow in scope, so broad that any meaningful comparison between the albums on the shortlist was impossible – are a distant memory.

An award that was set up specifically to sell albums at a traditionally quiet time of year, it no longer has much impact on sales. 2023’s winners Ezra Collective, a wonderful, inventive and compelling band, saw their album Where I’m Meant to Be propelled to No 30 for a week after last year’s ceremony, before vanishing from the charts again.

One reason why the prize feels diminished might involve the changes wrought by streaming. It’s put a vastly larger and more diverse array of music at people’s fingertips, and – thanks to a reliance on algorithms – music consumption has become more atomised and personal. It’s a climate in which the kind of cast-iron authority the Mercury has always purported to wield over musical worth – “I never, ever think we have got a winner wrong,” claimed then chair of judges Simon Frith in 2006 – looks shakier than ever, and, accordingly, no one seems that bothered.

You can’t argue with the quality of this year’s winner, just as you couldn’t really argue with the quality of indeed any of the recent Mercury victors. But under the circumstances, it’s hard not to wonder whether This Could Be Texas is remembered as this year’s winner or the last Mercury winner of all.