“I Felt For The First Time Like I Had A Purpose”: Antony Szmierek on Teaching, Finding Meaning, And His Darker Second Album

Antony Szmierek may have traded the classroom for festival stages, but his years as a teacher shaped the artist he’d become. The 34-year-old talks education, engagement, and his excellent new sophomore album.

Although Antony Szmierek is a famous musician, if you describe him as such, he bristles – but not at the part you’d expect. “It puts me on the back foot!” he laughs as he dials in from his Bristol flat, having already informed me that this call is the only thing that stands between him and the pub. “I do find it difficult to describe myself as a musician, and that's because I can't play an instrument.” While music may be his medium, Szmierek really believes his skill lies in one area: the writing of lyrics. But even then, there’s a further level of abstraction, because to him writing isn’t about writing. It’s about getting a message across. “Really, the skill you have there is you're a communicator,” he says. “You communicate with people en masse and teach them something or make them feel safe.”

Szmierek’s first album Service Station At The End Of The Universe garnered an audience that immediately connected to the lively, introspective songs that saw Szmierek wax lyrical over electronic beats in his Mancunian accent. His February 2025-released debut is upbeat and warm, even when it is tackling big topics, but his second album – Decoding Birdsong, which is unveiled on Friday 21st August 2026– feels different. “It’s so funny when you listen to people do interviews about second albums. always a darker, more personal record.” Szmierek pauses, wide-grinned, anticipating my question. “It’s a darker, more personal record.”.

Decoding Birdsong is releasing eighteen months after his first album. Szmierek wrote most of the album while he toured his first, in a spate of inspiration that reflected on his success. “It's about luck and loneliness and what happens if you get really lucky, which I kind of feel like I did a few years ago,” the 34-year-old explains. Although most would argue it was talent not luck, by any metric Szmierek has had a blessed couple of years. His first album became a smash hit, he’s supported The Streets on tour, and he’s played everywhere from Jools Holland to Glastonbury.

“It's one of those jobs where you should feel lucky all the time, but annoyingly, you don't,” he says. Szmierek’s breakthrough year bequeathed a wealth of high highs,and didn’t necessarily give him low lows. But it did at times feel tough. He found it a hard feeling to articulate such, until his friend Callum Moloney of the band Big Special gave him the language: “It's the easiest job ever 20% of the time”. Szmierek is quick to clarify that he wouldn’t change it – particularly his ability to reach people across the world with his music – but, more than anyone, he now knows it’s not all glamour. “I think if you distill it into an unromantic thing, I travel a lot and sort of live out of a suitcase in Travelodges across Europe,” he chuckles admittedly.

While Service Station at the End of the Universe was a shot into the unknown, his follow-up allowed him to reflect on what success meant and how it had changed his life. As he began to write, he found himself drawn back to a tough period he’d gone through a couple of years prior. At the time, he remembers that he was crying a lot – multiple times per day – an experience that's part and parcel with his craft. “I'm a poet, so my job really is to look beyond the surface of things and try and describe things in a way that other people will understand,” he explains. “But then it does sort of open you up, annoyingly, to live with your chest wide open and a big heart that's just a target.”

As he was processing these emotions, he would walk along the river Mersey – sometimes just meandering, sometimes walking and crying – and he found some company for his misery: a heron. Szmierek would visit the river every day and without fail he would see his avian friend. “I do think – shoot me if I’m wrong – that over the years I developed a relationship with this particular heron.” Whenever he saw the bird, who appeared again and again in his moments of need, Szmierek felt like he was on the right path. And then, he wrote an album about that feeling. “Is that the right way to react to seeing a bird that just lives in the tree near the river?” he self-analyses. “Or are we supposed to believe in magic? Is that a better way to live your life?”

As he spent more time with heron, Szmierek began thinking about it, reading about it, and found himself prescribing increasingly more meaning to it. “They’re between the land and the water, so they’re between worlds,” he explains, “and I really felt like I was between worlds”. Internally, Szmierek still felt like the Antony he’d always been. But things had changed in his life. He’d started to be recognised in Manchester, he was able to quit his day job, and people told him how much his work meant to them. “I didn’t feel like an established musician or an established normal person anymore. I felt in-between,” he says.

Not only did Szmierek’s experiences lead him to feel in-between, but he also felt the exact opposite of that, as though he was holding two things at the same time, a sentiment that he’s labelled as ‘bothness’. On one hand, he can’t believe where his work has brought him. “I wasn't in music, I didn't know anybody, and now suddenly I'm hanging around all these people whose records I used to listen to,” he marvels. But as much as it’s a shock, it’s not. People in his life would always tell him that he was going to do something, his mum constantly said he belonged on stage, and even he would catch himself imagining this kind of future. “I’d watch Jules Holland and go: When I'm on Jules Holland, I'll wear this and I'll do this.”

The main reason that he can’t believe where he’s ended up, though, is because of how new it feels. Just two years ago, Szmierek was teaching in schools. As a teen, he’d studied English at Manchester Uni and – although he’d ardently fended off the question ‘So what are you going to be, a teacher?’ – When he graduated, he did a PGCE and began to look for a job.

Before he went to his first interview, he remembers learning that there were twelve other candidates applying for the same role and he felt himself walk through the school’s gates with his head down, thinking: “I'll never get this, I'm shit”. As he’s telling this story, he pauses, his eyes going red as they hold back tears. “I really thought I was shit. I thought I was worthless. But I got the job. It was probably the first time anyone believed in me. Shout out to Andy Park, who was the Head Teacher at the time.”

Spurred on by this belief, Szmierek worked really hard to be the best teacher that he could be, and while the initial faith gave him the drive, it was working with the kids that really gave him meaning. “As hard as it got, as early as the mornings were, as late as the evenings were, and as stressed as I was, I just felt for the first time like I had a purpose and like a reason to be doing stuff.”

Teaching didn’t only give him meaning though, it also gave him the chance to practice his true calling: the art of performance. For Szmierek, the art of being a performer is really the art of making a room full of people feel something, and no audience is better to move than your pupils. Teachers should, of course, be focusing on what kids really need to know: Pythagoras’ theorem, oxbow lakes, protractors, etc. “But, there is nothing better,” Szmierek concedes, “than being able to make thirty people laugh, especially when you know they really fucking don’t want to be there. That is great.”

Szmierek’s experiences of teaching gave him the raw material for his writing too. “I lived a normal life. I understood community and empathy. It really gave me a leg up.” Rather than trying to appeal to an imagined audience, he writes songs for people just like him, working a normal job, trying to get by. “All of the parties, the award shows, they’re just shit,” he says. “Everyone wants purpose and connection. That’s what teaching gave me and that’s what this job gives me.” And it’s for that reason that he has a single piece of advice to any student who wants to get into music: become a nurse first.

In July, Szmierek performed at the Castlefield Bowl in Manchester. As he walked onto the stage, he heard someone scream ‘Mr Szmierek’ at him. When he looked down, he saw one of his old students. It brought back a memory: In 2023, just after he’d performed at Glastonbury, Szmierek returned to the school in which he was working. “The parents were coming in and saying: Why are you still here? But there was no money! I didn’t have a record deal.” As he stood in that moment, he thought about his return to school and about how far he’s come now and as he looked down at his ex-student, he sang just a little louder. “It’s a bit of self-belief that I’m not going back,” he smiles. “And anyway, I’m not gonna fucking pass the DBS check anymore.”