What exactly is Sam Fender best at? Depending on who you ask, you’ll get some wildly varying answers. To some, it’s the way he’s reintroduced classic rock’s spirit back to the mainstream who’ve duly snapped it up. To others, it’s how he’s unafraid to take a political stance that’s ground-level with mass appeal, but not with compromised beliefs. To others again, it’s his big, boozy singalongs mapped onto the next generation of lad-rock.
An answer you aren’t likely to come across is “making albums”, and that can be rather telling. While his fiercest defenders would treat calling Fender a pop star as an intense pejorative, it’s definitely how he’s been marketed, and how his catalogue has been structured so far. It’s not a secret or a coincidence that his biggest and best songs have been the ones with the most sonic immediacy—Seventeen Going Under; Will We Talk; Hypersonic Missiles; they’re the ones that were always built to get a bigger push. Accounting for albums that make their in-built rises and falls just as clear, it puts a different spin on Fender as this stadium-filling, festival-headlining, expectation-defying juggernaut that he’s been painted as. Within the world of pop, his sound carries a prestige by birthright that simply wouldn’t fit anywhere else.
People Watching could easily follow suit. Fender now has a triplet of albums where the opening title track is its ripping, obvious highlight, destined to be the one with the most chart sway and live presence. And to be fair, it’s not undeserving of that. A liberal reinterpretation of the Seventeen Going Under formula is just that ironclad, as Fender tours through northern England wracked by austerity, resonates with those most affected, and ties in up in a boundless heartland-rock anthem that gets more and more exalted with every spin. For another Sam Fender album, it’s the ideal way to start, and the high point that the subsequent 45 minutes couldn’t dream of matching up to.
But People Watching is different, in that that really isn’t the case. Yes, its title track is its proud apex, but it’s by no means as standalone as it once could’ve been. Indeed, People Watching has the consistency to be Fender’s best album, and it’s not even a contest. There’s been an almost universal levelling-up process to get there, where it’s a deeper, more explorative, often more aesthetically rich and edifying listen, all working in tandem with unparalleled success for a Fender album.
It’s notable how it’s ultimately taken a change of sound to get there, where the ‘Geordie Springsteen’ label that already had bitty application (though was leaned on way more) has all but dissipated from use now. You can largely thank Adam Granduciel of The War On Drugs for that, People Watching’s co-producer and newest guide for Fender’s venture into the American rock heartland. His influence brings in the synths and the widescreen cinematics, while finding a balance in all of Fender’s musical threads that had struggled to manifest previously. The title track is the tone-setter as its fevered bass crashes into a grand blur of guitar and gleam on the chorus, but this time, it’s not the only example. There, there’s Arm’s Length and Crumbling Empire, which may be smaller in scale but are full of the yearning and thousand-mile stares that this exact lineage of American rock thrives off, especially the latter.
Rather than a wholesale transformation into The Killers, though, Fender continues to know his own strengths. His love of English folk’s less romanticised, rose-tinted storytelling hasn’t gone away in any capacity; if anything, it’s a near-perfect tonic to keep this new sonic cache from spiralling out into untenability. Chin Up and Little Bit Closer are swollen with their backing vocals and mournful strings, gloomy in tone but absolutely spellbinding in execution. TV Dinner goes a step further, as a sonorous soul cut that seethes and rumbles within what’s easily the album’s most unfriendly palette. Even Wild Long Lie, which spends its early portions in clumpy countryside-folk that’s mid-morph into The Wurzels’ Combine Harvester, irons out to fit its characters’ mundane yet poignant wistfulness. And with the colliery brass that lends some beautiful eulogistic weight to the closer Remember The Name, it really couldn’t have come from anyone other than an English artist.
And with all of that in play, there’s a real boon afforded to Fender’s songwriting that has never felt this realised in the past. Thematically, nothing has really changed—he’s a normal guy from a working-class background embittered and saddened by the widespread deprivation afflicting his friends, family and community. But there’s something more this time, as if Fender’s fame and now-affordable efforts to give back to the people and places who made him can only do so much. Thus, the vignettes of People Watching are still rooted in the plights of exceedingly normal people—the loved one left to die due to a neglected care sector on the title track; Fender’s own parents losing their jobs under Thatcherite policies on Crumbling Empire; the gay boy facing ostracisation by his religious community on Little Bit Closer. Although TV Dinner throws its net out wider as a castigation on the music industry at large, Fender’s homegrown connections can easily make a refrain of “Am I up to this?” land with deeper connotations.
To that end, People Watching is definitely a heavier, more involved release than some of Fender’s in the past. The tone and lack of obvious anthems might put some off, but that’s counterbalanced by its richness and willingness to drill even deeper into what’s important. It’s also got more distinct flavour to it, in songwriting cues that are worlds away from Fender’s occupied mainstream stage. On an indie-rock album like this, it’s amazing how far something as basic as interesting words can go; the chorus of Little Bit Closer references the Italian mummy Ötzi, if you’re searching for how little chart-topping life has dulled Fender’s artistic sensibilities. Thus, you get People Watching, a genuinely great body of work that’s like nothing Fender has done before in all the right ways. If you’re still looking for what he’s really best, look no further.
For fans of: The War On Drugs, Oasis, Ryan Adams
‘People Watching’ by Sam Fender is out now on Polydor Records.
Words by Luke Nuttall
