People Watching

Fender’s success means that the songs on People Watching are more complex than the bleak home town vignettes of Seventeen Going Under. But they’re no less powerful.

‘People Watching’ is a bleak but astonishing rumination on our current times, viewed through the lens of Sam’s whirlwind past few years - an album that undoubtedly firms up his position as one of the great songwriters of our time.

Every song on People Watching is carefully crafted to remain with the listener. The bittersweet lyrics intertwined with catchy heartland rock and seamless vocals make this album Fender’s best yet.

With his previous efforts, Sam Fender was an exciting up-and-coming artist; on People Watching, Fender has now established himself as a generational talent requiring your attention.

Fender’s music covers a lot of thematic ground, and when these songs reach their majestic peaks, they become larger than life

Far from drab or sentimental, the results are often bright, robust, and admiring.

Fender lyrically distances himself from his first-hand experiences on ‘People Watching’, adding a new dimension to his already accomplished repertoire. Still, this album is a quintessential Sam Fender experience – a heartfelt, homegrown immersion of the mundane and extraordinary people and places this dweller was lucky enough to know.

Fender’s effortlessly direct lyrics are the anchor that uphold him as a heavyweight within Britain’s indie rock scene. The closing tracks of the album – ‘TV Dinner’, ‘Something Heavy’ and ‘Remember My Name’, on which he is joined by Easington Colliery Band – see him reaching upwards with new sonic ambitions.

It [TV Dinners] is one of a handful of exceptional songs that raise this album above Fender’s base level tendency towards passionate but undistinguished rocking. The most exquisite is the clipped guitar and synth mesh of the downbeat Crumbling Empire, that brushes against Springsteen’s Philadelphia with hints of Don Henley’s The Boys of Summer in a song about returning to the ruined scenes of his misspent youth.

A poignant portrait of post-industrial Britain - one that's leavened by some less-than-commonplace vocabulary. [Apr 2025, p.78]

He's unafraid to risk sentimentality in his quest for real feeling. At the end of a vexed, troubled third album, it feels like a hard-earned affirmation of his roots, people and community he's still a part of and still committed to. [Mar 2025, p.30]

Thankfully, the pairing [with Adam Granduciel] 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.

Fender hasn’t written his version of The River yet. But he’s sweating his way in that direction.

His third outing feels more introspective, without losing any of that gargantuan shine or him feeling like a stranger.