On his 2019 breakout debut single, “Play God”, Sam Fender reported from the scene of an anti-war protest (“Man is screaming through a megaphone / ‘Get your hands off the Middle East’”). Then, on the title track of his debut album Hypersonic Missiles, he sang of bombing in Gaza, impending war and media indoctrination. All this being backdropped by souring heartland rock quickly earned him the title ‘Geordie Springsteen’.
On the one hand, Fender’s success – all three of his albums have gone number one in the UK – seems highly unlikely; it’s exceedingly rare to hear Top 40 music this overtly political, and few songs in the charts sound like Sam’s. But on the other, it makes perfect sense – there’s no doubting that Sam’s finger is firmly on the pulse of an unsettled nation, and when hearing these songs live you can’t imagine them being played for anything other than sold-out stadiums.
For People Watching, his high-stakes third album that follows up the hugely successful Seventeen Going Under, Fender recruited Adam Granduciel of the War on Drugs to co-produce. The pairing led to both excitement – Granduciel is, after all, behind some of the most affecting indie rock of the 2010s – and trepidation – with Granduciel’s love of luscious soundscapes threatening to remove some of the more thrilling rough edges from Fender’s music.
Thankfully, the pairing is largely successful and allows Fender to shrewdly side-step expectations for his Seventeen follow-up; resulting in a mature take of arena rock and the most sonically cohesive Fender album thus far. “Wild Long Lie”, with its shades of Americana, showcases the pairing at its best – as does the 80s-esque “Crumbling Empire”.
The only real blunder resulting from the pairing is the title-track. Clearly wanting to replicate the raw energy of unlikely viral hit “Seventeen Going Under”, Fender and Granduciel threw the kitchen sink at “People Watching” – there’s synths, sax, strings, piano, glockenspiel and loud-quiet dynamics aplenty. It’s big and expansive, but this is a rare example of when Sam’s stadium sized-ambitions go overboard; dulling not enhancing the song’s power. It doesn’t help that the song’s refrain (“I people-watch on the way back home / Everybody on the treadmill, running”) is much less affecting than those contained in “Seventeen Going Under” (“I see my mother / The DWP sees a number”).
Outside of the title track – which provides a conceptual framework for an album about “everyday characters living their everyday lives” – Fender largely abandons “People Watching”’s zoomed-out lens for lived-in storytelling. It’s a good move that pays dividends on “Little Bit Closer”, a hugely compelling first-person portrait of a man struggling to reconcile religion and his sexuality, and the moving “Remember My Name”, a love song for Fender’s late grandparents.
People Watching’s most staggering moment, however, comes in the form of “TV Dinner”, a synth- and organ-featuring tune devoid of the acoustic guitar that sounds quite unlike anything else here. Menacing in both sound and tone, the song offers a damning indictment of celebrity culture, with reference to the media hounding of Amy Winehouse (“They love her now but bled her then”). Amidst a dystopian landscape of fame, Fender resolutely draws his boundaries (“No one gets into my space”). The world Fender surveys may be increasingly uncertain and unnerving, but this is a songwriter who’s rightfully confident regarding his place in it.
