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When you’re stuck in a small town, all you wanna do is get out. Trouble is, how do most small town bands try to get out? They write songs about how dreary small towns are, how grey and limited the lives that are lived there. They sing of drunken weekends and soul-sucking day jobs, of Friday night fights and cider-fuelled fumbles. They clamber out of the gutter by reminding their peers how deeply wedged there they are.

Not New Education. They’re the latest, greatest noise to emanate from Stoke-On-Trent, a town resembling “the grey areas of Manchester, Liverpool and Birmingham amalgamated into one little city.” They have the thump of Kasabian, the epic everyman appeal of The Enemy and the swagger of Weller, but there’s no living and dying in malicious towns in their songs. Instead, like Oasis circa ‘Champagne Supernova’, they aim at liberating their listeners with life-affirming melody.

New Education sprang, in January 2008, from the wreck of Ryan and Jack’s punkier previous band (the pair have been in bands together since the age of fourteen). Jettisoning a couple of players who weren’t pulling their weight, the pair and drummer John Bradbury announced to their sizable Stoke fanbase via Myspace that they were reforming as New Education, and posted the two songs they’d already recorded for the new project. Before they’d even recruited David Cartwright as their new guitarist, the labels were on the phone.

For three months New Education scurried away in their demo studio in a church’s storage room, writing enough tunes to justify the attention. Then they hit the North, dodging their Stoke fanbase to play headline shows across the country.

By the summer’s end, their graft was paying off. Their Stoke club night Club Education had rebuilt their local buzz and their skyrocketing escapist anthems, referencing The Clash and The Cure as much as any ladrock behemoth like Oasis, had landed them a singles deal with Kids Records, the label behind The Wombats, The Whip, iLIKETRAINS and Band Of Horses. In October they released a limited-to-500 single ‘Today’, the balladesque totem of the band.

The single sold out; the whirlwind struck. Within six months New Education had toured with The Twang, The Holloways, Peter Doherty and The Rifles, prompting scenes of devotion, delirium, frugging moshpits and flung pints wherever they went.

“The way I see it songs should set you free,” says singer and guitarist Ryan Dooley, “and a lot of the bands nowadays tie you down. I keep hearing about a mundane existence in every song, especially from bands in our genre. Bands sing about how grim it is rather than how amazing it should be. All New Education songs are about breaking out.”

“There’s enough bands who are all about grey England and spilt lager,” adds his bassist brother Jack, “and even though on the surface you get that impression from a band like ours, the intention has always been to be a positive thing.”

And with New Education in your life, you’re undoubtedly making the most of it. Welcome the Midlands’ newest ‘Miracle’ workers.

Mark Beaumont, NME