Sam Fender – People Watching

Sam Fender, following on from 2021’s critical breakthrough Seventeen Going Under, is back with People Watching: a staggering, politically charged outing that feels like a landmark moment for the Northern rocker.

The album opens with the titular track People Watching: built upon a simple but effective piano melody, a sharp guitar thread and momentum-gathering percussion, Fender brings a sense of scale to this hometown tale and delivers a soaring ballad of a loved one in a dilapidated nursing-home, under the care of a health-service stretched thin. If there is any comparison to be made with the rock icon Bruce Springsteen (an artist who has had a clear influence on Fender), it’s the sheer magnitude that Fender brings to these small, everyday stories and how, through raw, haunting imagery and diverse musicality, Fender manages to wrangle these small-town images into grand, stadium-ready pop-rock.

Wild Long Lie is soon to follow: a darker, vocal-driven rumination of drug abuse, and the need to break free of the confines of his home-town that’s tail-ended with an excellent “Clarence Clemons” styled sax solo. Arm’s Length, the stand-out track of the album, is a small-scale and quietly devastating portrait of a relationship fractured by an unwillingness to open up: “I’m selfish and I’m lonely / Arm’s length, small talk and then some company / But do you have to know me inside out?” fuelled by an infectious guitar hook, and the brief but welcome addition of a folksy harmonica in the track’s closing moments. Arm’s Length goes to prove that sometimes, less can be more for the North Shields native. Things begin to take a momentary turn with TV Dinner: an unsettling, almost Radiohead-esque entry with its melancholic trill of electric guitar and echoing percussion, that creates an eerie sense of an encroaching darkness with its tangled and knotted melodies.

The album comes to a close with Remember My Name, a vocal-driven closer that serves as a tribute to Fender’s late grandparents: “Oh, 11 Wark Avenue, something to behold / To them, it’s a council house, to me, it’s a home / A home that you made where the Grandkids could play.” It’s a touching, and completely surprising final track that ditches the electric guitar for something more gospel-inspired, with a sprawling organ-like synth backdrop that leaves nowhere to hide for Fender’s powerful vocal run. A brave and fitting close to People Watching that stands as a marked, but not unwelcome, departure from Fender’s usual sound.

If Fender truly is Gen Z’s Springsteen, then People Watching may be his Nebraska: a tender, socially aware collection of tracks that takes bold steps. With one eye fixed on his roots and another on the road ahead, the artist continues his well-established trend of musical memoir that now comes with a sense of newfound maturity. That’s not to say that Fender, like Springsteen in 1982, has momentarily subbed out his Stratocaster for an acoustic guitar moment on People Watching – the stadium-ready anthems we have come accustomed to, à la the Ivor Novello-winning Seventeen Going Under and his 2019 debut Hypersonic Missiles, are here, but they’re more sombre in their stylings, occasionally more folk-inspired in their rhythms, and purposefully slighter with less frequent hits of unfettered, explosive energy that we have seen on both previous records. Nor do these songs lack any of the thought-provoking lyricism of Fender’s earlier outings, managing to tap into the socioeconomic frustrations of his generation and working-class Britain, further cementing Fender’s position as one of our most important songwriters today. An older, more pensive Fender delivers another inspired album in the triumphant People Watching.

Ronan Fawsitt
Image: Mac Scott

People Watching is released on 21^st February 2025. For further information or to order the album visit Sam Fender’s website here.

Watch the video for the single People Watching here: