Sam Fender Heads Home on "People Watching"
Graphic by Maddie Cohen
by Charlie Desjardins
I first heard Sam Fender in 2022 after the release of his second album Seventeen Going Under (2021). I was sitting in a car. It was raining. I was waiting for my dad to finish getting a haircut. I listened to the full album in awe.
Then it hit me. This dude sorta sounds like Bruce Springsteen. That comparison sounds obvious now—every music critic and their mother has coined him the “Geordie Springsteen”—but at the time it was utterly remarkable. The Boss has always been my favorite artist, and I’d never heard such a worthy successor. I still haven’t. Both artists write small-town poetry, have an obsession with the working man, love good rock-and-roll sax sounds, and tend to howl their asses off.
Therefore, with Fender’s long-awaited third album People Watching, I had it in mind that I’d be hearing something parallel to Darkness on the Edge of Town. It would be a jagged step forward in a career full of Born to Run-esque daydreaming, and with The War on Drugs’ Adam Granduciel handling production, it would sound huge.
Against all odds, People Watching goes in the total opposite direction. Instead of digging deeper into Springsteen’s beaten-up scrapbook, Sam Fender has set about creating his own tribute with family photos and glue. The result is bright rock-and-roll with a newly sophisticated backbone, and it’s pretty damn great. The North Shields-born singer has matured into a storyteller of rare wisdom and integrity over his three-year hiatus, and he’d like to reintroduce himself by reintroducing the UK of his youth. People Watching is an album of painfully average losers, addicts, and widows, and even if that focus occasionally constricts, it never becomes preachy. Following a couple of listens, it’s clear Fender has told some of his best tales yet.
“Nostalgia’s Lie,” the album’s second track, is one of the finest in the Fender songbook—a melancholic reexamining of childhood comforts that sounds like the prodigal son of The Killers and The La’s. It’s the sort of gentle, brilliant rocker the Brit has touched on before (see: Hypersonic Missiles standout “Will We Talk?”), but this time, with a country-flavored soul, Fender’s crooning goes over like vanilla ice cream for the soul. That same reliable warmth is found in “Arm’s Length,” a stripped-down groover with plucky guitar work and harmonica, and “Something Heavy,” a hangdog pub anthem about young people finding connection through their mutual fucked-up-ness.
Fender has always been an unquestionable master of the cathartic, mid-tempo rock song, and People Watching finds him in overdrive. Granted, sometimes that wealth can feel crushing. For every “Crumbling Empire,” a wailing Toto pastiche that explores Thatcher-era privatization, there’s generic fluff on string-drenched “Chin Up” and “Wild Long Lie.” These two songs aren’t horrible, and the lyrics on “Wild Long Lie” are passingly clever in their exploration of addiction and disillusionment, but they largely sound like Sam Fender on autopilot.
I find myself lobbying that same complaint against People Watching’s opening (and title) track, a song about homecoming, death, and treadmills. Ironically, it runs in place a little too long. Many have compared it to Fender’s similarly autobiographical “Seventeen Going Under,” and if the singer were still in that younger, poppier phase I’d happily accept it as a supplement. As he is now, I have a hard time believing the song’s strength as a centerpiece, and I have an even harder time accepting its sterile guitar sound. It sounds like a mere skimming of the star’s best works—a largely inoffensive one, but dull nevertheless.
“I people-watch on the way back home / Envious of the glimmer of hope…”
Thankfully Fender is too smart to serve the same meal eleven times, and People Watching’s adventurous detours are where the album truly strikes gold. One of these numbers, “TV Dinner,” is a sullen spitfire anchored by a clobbering doomsday drum shuffle. I’m not sure if I’ve ever heard him so angry. It’s an unflinching portrait of the UK music industry that swallowed Amy Winehouse whole, and Fender’s desperate pleading for solitary confinement makes the song a brutal highlight.
“It was wild,” Fender recently told The Sunday Times. “I wrote [“TV Dinner”], then Liam Payne died… I remember watching some videos he was in and being, like, ‘God, what a tit.’ But the reality was that he was just a young lad, famous far too young, who had addiction trouble – and everyone hit him with the pitchforks.”
This successful experimentation continues on the album’s final track “Remember My Name,” a horn-drenched message from his grandfather to his dying grandmother. All signs point to it slipping into syrupy sentimentality, yet Fender’s belting somehow pierces the heart. The secret is a misty-eyed sense of late-stage optimism.
“I'm not sure of what awaits / Wasn't a fan of Saint Peter and his gates / But, by God, I pray / That I'll see you in some way…”
It’s a complete stunner, calling to mind the ache of Seventeen’s piano-drenched closer “The Dying Light” but fusing it with Suede’s glam-grandiose “Still Life.”
It brought me to tears. I never knew Sam Fender had it in him.
People Watching is the definition of an emotionally excellent rock-and-roll album, especially by 2025 standards. Not many young guns are interested in exploring the heartland that Springsteen mapped out in the ‘70s and ‘80s. Heck, neither is Sam Fender. His roads are equally full of rubble, but unlike his car-obsessed New Jersey ancestor, Fender makes music for those who walk the last half-mile (and then retire into bars for the night). That journey might be a little too samey for its own good, but its purity hits in decidedly sparkly ways.
“I’m not preaching, I’m just talking,” Fender sings on “Crumbling Empire.”
I hope he keeps talking. People Watching is music for dreamers who wake up in cold sweats.
You should always listen to the full album, but if you’re running late for a meeting (or a burial), check out these three: “Nostalgia’s Lie,” “TV Dinner,” and “Arm’s Length.”