Sam Fender has continued to tease his new album, this time by sharing a live version of his as-yet-unreleased song ‘People Watching’ with fans – three years to the day his last album came out.
The North Shields singer posted a link on his Instagram Stories which takes fans to a web page where they’re asked for their phone number. Fans then receive a text containing a link to a YouTube video of his performance of ‘People Watching‘ at Boardmasters in August.
It’s the same song he shared a teaser of on Instagram last week. On Wednesday (October 2), he shared snippets of him filming the speakers inside his studio to showcase two sections of the track.
Fender hasn’t released a lot of music since his 2021 Number One album ‘Seventeen Going Under’, his most recent new tracks being ‘Homesick‘ with Noah Kahan after the American singer-songwriter re-recorded the hit for his digital album ‘Stick Season (Forever)’ and ‘Iris’, from the movie Jackdaw.
It was on August 3 that he first played ‘People Watching’ live, along with another unreleased song, ‘Nostalgia’s Lie’, with both set to appear on his upcoming third album.
This past Saturday (October 5), Fender teased that the album – on which he’s had input from The War On Drugs’ Adam Granduciel, is finished and “mastered”, sharing a series of photos and videos from the studio on Instagram.
While Fender left a gap of two years between his debut album ‘Hypersonic Missiles’ and ‘Seventeen Going Under’, there’s going to be a gap of at least three between ‘Seventeen Going Under’ and his third album.
But he admitted earlier this year that he “rushed” to complete his last album. In an interview on Sky Arts’ Johnson and Knopfler’s Music Legends, Fender shared: “The third one we started rushing and I thought, ‘No, we have got to take the time’. I want to do the best I possibly can. I’d rather it be late and great than early and shite. What we have got so far I am absolutely over the moon with but I want to give it that bit more time and more thought.”
Speaking to NME in September 2022, he offered some more thoughts on the album, describing his new music as “very pretty” and having a strong “singer-songwriter” vibe – and said that he wasn’t planning to write music just to fill massive venues. “If I try and force myself to write stadium songs, we could end up fucking it I think,” he explained. “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. And I’ve had a lot to write about.”
He continued, “I’m not living in my mum’s flat anymore, and that’s where a lot of the songs were written from the last record. But I’m still in [North] Shields, you know, I never left. I’m still friends with all the same people. All my family and all my friends are still all in the same boat, so there’s a level of guilt that comes with it when you feel like things are going good, because I’ve still got loads of pals who are living in dire straits. It’s always there.”
As for ‘Seventeen Going Under’, which was named Best Album In The World and Best Album By A UK Artist at the BandLab NME Awards 2022, NME gave it four stars, calling it a “bruising” second album and saying, “If ‘Hypersonic Missiles’ was the sound of a young boy kicking out at the world, ‘Seventeen Going Under’ sees Fender realise that it can kick back a lot harder, and he counts every blow and bruise. But he seems to have found that time passes and that most wounds – even the deepest – will eventually heal, if he can allow them to.”
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