It’s simple to be skeptical of Sam Fender. Blond, blue eyed, wanting like Gary Barlow’s indie child brother, with a reputation that appears like a model endorsement, when he picked up the Critics Award on the 2019 BRITs, you may need mistaken him for the business’s newest tastefully distressed millennial singer-songwriter. However since his debut single in 2017, the canny chanter from North Shields has emerged as probably the most pushed, distinctive and engaging British pop artist since Amy Winehouse.
His second album, Seventeen Going Beneath, launched in autumn 2021, was a outstanding achievement specifically, a British pop report that exposed one thing of the mood of recent occasions. Fender sang of retail parks, cocaine, informal violence, the DWP and suicide – a world acquainted sufficient within the works of Stormzy or Sleaford Mods, however near a revelation within the coronary heart of the Radio 2 A-list.
What bought the imaginative and prescient was Fender’s endearing anger and confusion, and his wealthy Geordie roar, as if the Angel of the North was immediately breaking into music. No much less necessary was his capability to drag off a convincing tackle what his wikipedia web page describes as “heartland rock”. In observe it’s the sound of mid-’80s Tom Petty and Bruce Springsteen filtered via the dynamics of The Strokes and Arctic Monkeys – with possibly a distant jangling echo of nice misplaced mid-80s Tyneside hopes Hurrah!.
Folks Watching, his third album, has been a few years within the making, recorded in London after which LA, and divulges an artist at a crossroads. The title observe, launched because the lead single on the finish of final 12 months, showcased his collaboration with Adam Granduciel from The Struggle On Medicine and felt like an announcement of intent. Although it’s rooted in a well-known Fenderworld – a bedside vigil for a dying mentor in an underfunded care house – Granduciel’s booming manufacturing appears scaled for the freeway fairly the A167. A lot of the album appears to have a minimum of one foot or a few wheels throughout the Atlantic: “Crumbling Empire” opens on the ruined streets of Detroit and cruises alongside in Granduciel’s baleful Bruce Hornsby mode. And in “Wild Lengthy Lie” one among Fender’s mates takes an unlikely second out from caning it to think about American carceral coverage.
If one route from Fender’s crossroads results in the US, promoting heartland rock again to the homeland (it beats taking coals to Newcastle) then one other leads again to the previous cities and villages the place he more and more appears like a stranger. If Seventeen Going Beneath was created out of an enforced interval of lockdown introspection, Folks Watching needs to be a gap up, a re-engagement with previous friends, guided by the affectionate however implacable spirit of Tish Murtha, the documentary photographer whose footage grace the art work.
But when Fender will get out of the confines of his personal head, he finds loads of folks getting out of theirs. The ghost of Oasis appears to hang-out a whole lot of the album, from the “Wonderwall”-y guitars that open “Chin Up”, an try to lean into and dance with the wild temper swings, to the pervading blizzard of cocaine that falls over so many characters in “Wild Lengthy Lie” which concludes “I feel I want to depart this city”.
Yet another highway then, leads straight again contained in the jail of the ego. “TV Dinner” is the album’s greatest departure. Over doleful piano chords, it’s a paranoid declaration of independence worthy of Kendrick Lamar, paying homage to the demise of Amy Winehouse and detailing all of the ways in which younger abilities are led to market as money cows. “No-one,” he sings defiantly, “will get into my house.”
However Fender – a person very happy with his Greggs Gold card – is in the end too gregarious to remain on this fortress of solitude for very lengthy. The album concludes again house “stomping across the village with you once more”. “One thing Heavy” is his model of “The Weight” – a hymn to mutual help in powerful occasions, a proposal to maintain the kettle boiling at the same time as everybody within the city falls sufferer to the black canine of despair.
And the closing “Keep in mind My Identify” returns to his previous council home in North Shields, with the rousing swells of the Easington Colliery Brass Band and Fender sounding slightly like Sting in his greater register. For a lesser artist it would threat embarrassment: a Hovis advert homily to fireplace and residential. Nevertheless it’s a part of Sam Fender’s artwork that, just like the Boss or Lindesfarne’s Alan Hull, he’s unafraid to threat sentimentality in his quest for actual feeling. On the finish of a vexed, troubled third album, it appears like a hard-earned affirmation of his roots, the folks and neighborhood he’s nonetheless part of and nonetheless dedicated to. Within the rolling turmoil of 2025, these troubled heartlands want him greater than ever.
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