It's the kind of concert you know you’ll remember for years to come.

Stepping into a packed crowd for their sold-out concert, English Teacher's synth-suffused walk-on music filled every molecule of air with hyped potential energy. Having listened to their recent debut album, This Could Be Texas, ad nauseam, I knew I would bear witness to something incredible.

The five-piece – guitarist Lewis Whiting, drummer Douglas Frost, bassist Nicholas Eden, Blossom Calderone on cello and  singer/multi-instrumentalist Lily Fontaine – quietly sauntered onstage before immediately breaking into the rallying cry of 'The World's Biggest Paving Slab,' to which the crowd knew every word.

Starting off with such a track set a very high bar for the remainder of the night, but each performance raised it higher and higher – so that, by the end, the bar scraped the cosmos. Bursting into the prismatic electronics of 'Not Everybody Gets to Go to Space,' that otherworldliness became all the more apparent. Of course, not everybody gets to go to space, but English Teacher were certainly up there, floating among the constellations.

English Teacher at Whelan's, Dublin, 22 March 2024. Copyright Bailey Shropshire/hotpress.com

Every track, even the slow-burns, sounded massive and propulsive: a dense celestial palette of indie, R&B, prog and punk, guided by one of the few rising ensembles with the range and intuition to see it through. 'Mastermind Specialism' was tremendous to hear live, with its slow teases of building to something which never arrives. It's quite the undertaking to translate such songs for the stage, but it fit seamlessly. Offerings like 'I'm Not Crying, You're Crying' and 'Broken Biscuits' are tailor-made for gigs, with their hammering rhythm section compounded by bandleader Lily Fontaine's rapturous vocals.

There aren’t enough words to aptly describe Fontaine’s freight train of a stage presence. She innocuously strolled on stage with the other members – donning a white Victorian-esque blouse with a matching, oversized scrunchie in her slicked-back hair – before throwing herself headlong into a waste-no-bullets performance. Already, Fontaine is a full-fledged, undeniable rockstar in every sense of the word.

English Teacher at Whelan's, Dublin, 22 March 2024. Copyright Bailey Shropshire/hotpress.com

Her tightrope vocal acrobatics were unbelievable, shifting seamlessly from torch-song belters like ‘You Blister My Paint’ to such rip-roaring headbangers as ‘Nearly Daffodils’ and ‘R&B.’ Fontaine's voice is a rare thing to behold: sculpting silhouettes of manic punk-rock front-women and gospel singers howling mid-spiritual. Each rendition catalysed a collective yolk-breaking into rolling sonic ecstasy, and the crowd just lapped it up. It was a near-religious experience to witness the singer take the audience's accepting hands as she crowd-surfed over frenzied, sweat-beaten bodies.

English Teacher at Whelan's, Dublin, 22 March 2024. Copyright Bailey Shropshire/hotpress.com

On 'You Blister My Paint,' a grave and awed intensity muted the congregation. Stood there amongst it, I felt like a node in a network of raw emotion, a little brainless plant simply reacting to the cathartic whirl of sound and colour. In that pocket of soft resplendence, tension started to build, beating against the inevitable madness that remains unfinished. Soon enough, that meteorite of mania came crashing down.

English Teacher at Whelan's, Dublin, 22 March 2024. Copyright Bailey Shropshire/hotpress.com

The crowd reached a pitch with each successive tune, but they became especially fevered during a startling rendition of 'This Could Be Texas,' the title track from their debut. Picking up her left-handed guitar, Fontaine joined Whiting's coiling riffs for a head-spinning conversation of inverted harmonies that tumbled over the backing of caterwauling cello, rousing basslines and inexorable drumming. The boldness of their artistry was on full display here, watching as the members descend into a pummelling sonic exorcism.

Watching the mayhem take place, I was reminded of my mother, who often shared legendary stories of going to CBGB’s after long shifts at a Manhattan pizza parlour to see an up-and-coming band called Talking Heads. She’d tell me of her deep-seated gut feeling that the band, and a 23-year-old David Byrne, would go on to stratospheric heights – that the stages and crowds could only get bigger.

Standing amidst the chaos in Whelan’s last night, I briefly envisioned myself years later telling my children about how I got the chance to see one of the world’s biggest bands, amongst a few hundred slack-jawed people in Whelan's, watching their eyes widen in awe just as mine did. They’d ask me what it was like, and all I could offer was a nostalgic 'you had to be there' sigh, as words fail to encapsulate the experience in full.

Toss as many possible descriptors at it, engulf the article with emerging and vogue comparisons to polish off the brain battling a dwindling supply of expressions. In the end, they pave the same road.

English Teacher at Whelan's, Dublin, 22 March 2024. Copyright Bailey Shropshire/hotpress.com

Transcendent, rising and jaw-dropping, there was an emotional fluster, a buzzing catharsis to the experience. Some reviews just write themselves. Walls of text do no justice to performances as formidable as this. The rock hall-of-famers English Teacher are destined to become is very much the writing on the wall.