We need more artists like this

Review of Sam Fender's "Seventeen Going Under (Deluxe)"

Sam Fender—Seventeen Going Under (Deluxe)

Released October 8, 2021

I don’t use this word lightly, but Sam Fender really is underrated. Aside from hearing one song on TikTok, as is how I am often introduced to artists, I had no expectations of what Fender’s music sounded like or ideas of what to expect. But what I found was an artist whose music  takes sonic cues from other rock acts that have come before, but his writing and his perspective is uniquely his own.

It’s very hard to make a living making art if you don’t already come from wealth, this we know. That’s why we’re obsessed with rags to riches stories, and feel cheated when an artist downplays their wealthy backgrounds or parental connections, which leads to accusations of being an “industry plant” or a “nepo baby.” But paradoxically, the few authentic working class stories that do exist in music are rarely highlighted. In the genre of country music, the shiny rhinestone cowboy music of Garth Brooks or the trap beat laden songs of Florida Georgia Line outsold the kind of authentic Bluegrass music that you’d hear from neighbors’ front porches. And in the UK, outside of Joe Cocker, Oasis, and maybe Arctic Monkeys, few bands from the North of England get much press, or when they do, are taken seriously. Which maybe explains why Fender’s sophomore record Seventeen Going Under about coming from a working class family in Sheffield is a record that was too quickly skipped over, but doesn’t make it any less of  a shame.

When it was released in late 2021, it ranked well amongst UK music publications, even making NME’s number 1 album of the year. And maybe because Fender has since come out saying that the creation of this album was “rushed” and that he’s taking his time on the next one to get it perfect, but the good will this album generated quickly faded away and it seems rarely brought up again since its release. It also that especially American audiences didn’t really catch on to this record, despite the themes of it being about the English North fit very closely to themes often discussed about the American South.

I really would have thought this album would have been more widely celebrated and discussed often as a recent album that demonstrates a step in a musical direction that many are lamenting is long gone. For all those jeering about Taylor Swift or Sabrina Carpenter or Beyonce, or any number of pop singers that they claim don’t play “real instruments” or have too many songwriters, here’s a self-written album full of “classic rock ambition” that takes great influence from the greats like Bruce Springsteen. Just like they were celebrating Greta Van Fleet as the saviors of rock’n’roll, where are they now for Sam Fender?

Some reviews from large publications like Pitchfork disliked the political bend to the lyrics, calling them “scattered” and saying it “never sticks the landing.” However, I think the writing on this album is brave. It’s brave in the sense that no one else is really writing like this at the moment and it feels raw and honest and at times deeply vulnerable. If you’ve been wondering where the punk rock poets are, here’s one.

“Aye” is a perfect song to start with to illustrate this point. The rage heard in both the lyrics and the vocal performance, particularly in the bridge, is palpable. The repeated phrase of “Hate the poor” in Fender’s strong Geordie accent speaks to him honoring where he comes from and not softening himself to be palatable to a wider UK audience. But as far as a biting social critique, “Paradigms” cut with a precision that left me surprised that he actually said the words rather than skirting around them.

Just as this album is calling out injustices and pointing at the hypocrisies of the modern world, Fender is equally pointing inward, which appears most simplistically and poignantly on the album’s closer “Poltergeists.” He sings “I haven’t been the best of men/Morality is an evolving thing/I can blame the time, I can blame the whigs/I can blame the things that we saw as kids.”

In looking inwardly, Fender also tackles mental health, particularly on “The Dying Light,” in which he likens past generations’ losses from war deaths to his generation’s losses from mental health related deaths. But then on “Good Company,” he looks at his own mental health, and how he feels his own highs and lows negatively affects those around him.

“Mantra” feels like his “this is me trying” moment, where he’s earnestly expressing a desire to break the cycle of behavior, but he cuts the seriousness and earnestness by throwing in the line “Or something like that.” It feels similar to the way in Hozier’s “First Time” he describes with specificity a time where he was touched by flowers left for him by his mother and he’s thinking about the flowers as a metaphor for life but cuts the earnestness and sincerity with a single word, quickly sung “anyway.” Between these two moments, it feels like there are still a ways to go until male singer-songwriters can express deep or serious feelings without feeling the need to undermine it.

My favorite songs on this album are “Angel in Lothian,” “Long Way Off,” “Last To Make It Home,” “Paradigms,” and “Alright.”

Just to highlight again what is even more impressive about the lyrics on this record is that they’re all self-written, which lends to the “full-hearted sincerity” that Pitchfork highlighted as feeling “refreshing and entirely his own.” There’s many critiques of artists who have too many songwriting credits on a single song, and while I’m undecided where I stand in that debate, I do think this album is made better for having a singular perspective at the helm.

The Guardian also commended this album, saying it “feels urgent, incisive and brave when it would have been easier for Fender to deck out his festival-ready, TikTok-able melodies with something notably blander and less pointed.”

The title track, which also served as the first single, did gain some popularity online thanks to TikTok and the trend accompanying it with creators telling stories about times where they couldn’t stand up for themselves, but now with passed time and acquired strength, they would.  And I would hope that the song having a moment online didn’t dissuade anyone from giving the whole record a listen because to echo what the writer for the Guardian said, this album packs a punch that is so much greater than what a 15-second TikTok sound can convey.

After listening to this album in full, I so badly regret not seeing him play live at TRNSMT Festival  last year when I could have. In my defense, it was rainy and cold that day in Glasgow and I had already hung around for longer than I planned to that day, but I should have stuck around, if for nothing else than just to hear “Angel in Lothian” acoustic.

For having truly very few expectations going into this record, I was throughly impressed. I understand that Fender himself is not particularly proud of this record, but I don’t think he’s giving himself credit for what this album achieves. I’ve been pleasantly surprised by quite a few of the albums I’ve listened to, but this quickly jumped up into my top ranking of albums I’ve reviewed. No matter what the other reviews said, I think we could do with more artists, particularly making music with this kind of rock sound, taking from the honest and sincere songwriting style that Fender displays here. Whenever he feels the next album is ready to be heard, I’ll be ready to hear it.