Sam Fender’s ‘People Watching’ is a grand return from one of the UK’s best storytellers
Sam Fender’s strongest suit has always been his evocative storytelling. You can hear it in early tracks like 2018’s ‘Poundshop Kardashians’ through the title track of his debut album ‘Hypersonic Missiles’ to the coming-of-age tales that brought 2021’s ‘Seventeen Going Under’ so vividly to life. Throughout that journey, he’s consistently possessed a sharp talent for immersing you in a scene, building worlds in your mind’s eye with his words alone.
Three years after the release of his second album – which took the top spot on NME’s Albums Of The Year list in 2021 – that spark has far from burnt out. ‘People Watching’, the title track and first single from his upcoming third album, is classic Fender – a song whose lyrics you feel like you can walk through and one that seamlessly weaves together big picture concerns with personal experience.
Although it was produced in LA with The War On Drugs’ Adam Granduciel, this is a dispatch from the North Shields musician’s hometown. It captures journeys to and from a palliative care home where he would visit his late friend and mentor, Annie Orwin – who he’s described as being like “a surrogate mother to” him – and the mix of sentiments and observations that made up those trips.
Full of reflection and sadness, anger and disillusionment, grief and nostalgia, ‘People Watching’ courses with raw feeling. “Used to feel so invincible / I used to feel there was a world worth dreaming of,” Fender laments, casting his mind back to a time when “the beauty of youth” and all its naïveté could plaster over the gloom and doom. Now, though, all that’s left are the memories that make him “feel so dark”. The second verse, when he depicts the state of the care home his loved one is in (“Understaffed and overruled by callous hands”), is more biting still, the artist managing to colour its lines with what feels like a melancholy kaleidoscope of emotion.
Driving, expansive and cinematic, it feels made for getting lost in your thoughts as you watch the world go by out of the window. The War On Drugs influence is palpable here, but not derivative, taking the core Fender sound of heartland rock and adding a little extra sparkle. Crucially, it also kicks off the road to his third album on very strong footing and, at five minutes and 11 seconds, proves you don’t need to cram everything into two minutes for it to demand repeat listens.
“If I try and force myself to write stadium songs, we could end up fucking it, I think,” Fender told NME in 2022 of making his next record. “Instead, I want to write about the stories that I have and the place that I’m mentally at in my life at this point.” By sticking to what he’s best at, the musician has avoided falling into any such traps – and ended up with a song grand enough to get a whole stadium going without compromising on the heart and power that we’ve come to expect from him. If the rest of ‘People Watching’ follows suit, Fender’s third album should be another world-beater.
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Rhian Daly
NME
