Get the latest gossip
Sam Fender: People Watching review | Alexis Petridis's album of the week
On his third album, produced by the War on Drugs, the North Shields singer-songwriter shows just how gifted he is at pairing stadium choruses with sharp, bleak vignettes
It relentlessly picks away at the bleakest realities of northern working-class life, seldom a fashionable cause: you’d probably have to look back to Design for Life-era Manic Street Preachers – or even further, to the heyday of the Jam – to find rock musicians who made a similar agenda so commercially successful. His band the War on Drugs share Fender’s audible love of Bruce Springsteen and tight, metronomic Krautrock-influenced rhythms, but their sound also boasts a faint haze of psychedelia and a greater sense of space, both of which are brought to bear on People Watching: in the electronic drone that underpins Arm’s Length, the slide guitar, feedback and synthesiser that arc around Wild Long Lie’s extended coda, the ominous, echo-laden atmosphere conjured on TV Dinner. It’s a smart move, because more than anything, People Watching reaffirms that Fender is a very good songwriter indeed: strong on melodies (the descending chord sequence of Nostalgia’s Lie is particularly nagging; the see-sawing tune of TV Dinner hypnotic), handy with a roaring, emotive, arena-friendly chorus, and exceptionally gifted with words.
Or read this on The Guardian