Sam Fender isn’t exactly the poster boy for British lad rock—though you wouldn’t know it from the haircut. “I’m like the antithesis of what those lot like,” he laughs, taking a swing at a very specific breed of UK music fans—the ones who swear by four bands, all of them sporting mop tops and Union Jack parkas. “Stone Roses, Oasis, Paul Weller, Ocean Colour Scene—and everything else just sucks.” Never mind that Fender’s been championed by Weller himself, who doubled as an unofficial A&R rep for Seventeen Going Under, greenlighting tracks as Sam cranked them out. “I kept sending him songs to get the seal of approval,” he says, deadpan. “Last to Make It Home—that’s Weller’s favorite.”
And yet, for someone raised on the Gallagher brothers’ bravado, Fender’s music hits different. Sensitive, self-aware, and politically pissed-off, Seventeen Going Under is part memoir, part state-of-the-nation address. Written during lockdown, when Fender was marooned in his hometown of North Shields, the album forces him to confront every ghost on every street. “I couldn’t have written this in New York,” he admits. “Being stuck at home, constantly reminded of everything—it gave me no choice but to write about it.”
Of course, most guys from North Shields don’t exactly flock to therapy. “People don’t really do therapy where I come from,” Fender says. “Even my dad’s like, ‘I don’t believe in it.’” But success bought him the luxury of self-examination, and with it came the songs. “I couldn’t write about being 17 when I was 17. I didn’t know how to unpack it all,” he explains. “Therapy gave me the tools to understand why I am the way I am.”
The result is an album that hits like a punch and heals like a hug. “People who like it seem to get a lot of catharsis from it,” he says, modestly. “Which is lovely.”
That catharsis, however, wasn’t born out of some abstract artistic quest. It was forged in real hardship, watching his mother—a lifelong nurse—get chewed up by the UK’s failing social safety net. “She was struggling with fibromyalgia, mental health, and they kept dragging her to court to prove she was unfit to work,” Fender recalls, still seething. “I was 17, couldn’t help financially, just watching her deteriorate in this council flat with black mold on the walls. That’s when I got socially aware.”
His rage is specific, but his songs are universal. “The cracks in the system are getting worse. The safety net’s disappearing,” he says, comparing Britain’s unraveling healthcare to America’s own. “I’m a big fan of healthcare—I think people deserve it.”
No surprise, then, that Bobby Gillespie of Primal Scream has hailed Fender as one of the few British artists still willing to take a stand. Fender credits his working-class roots for his social conscience, and throws shade at the privatized, posh-dominated charts. “Most of the kids in the charts now are privately educated,” he says. “If your parents are Tories hiding money in the Cayman Islands, you’re probably not writing about impoverished neighborhoods in the north of England.”
Still, he’s not alone. “Fontaines D.C.—they’re my best pals in London. They’re writing about real shit,” he says, pushing back on the idea that protest music is dead. “Maybe people just aren’t looking hard enough.”
And speaking of friends, he’s about to hit the road with The Killers, another band of Springsteen disciples chronicling the death of small-town dreams. “When I first heard ‘West Hills,’ I was like, that motherfucker’s using a mandolin too!” he laughs. “But mine came out first.”
Brandon Flowers and Sam Fender might be separated by continents, but their narratives rhyme: towns beaten down by systems, nostalgia for a place you can’t escape, and just enough hope to write about it.
Fender’s deluxe edition of Seventeen Going Under adds a darker coda to the story, ending with “Poltergeists” and the chilling line, “Tonight I’ll join them when I die.” It’s not just a bonus track—it’s an encore to the whole journey. “I purposely put that at the end. It felt like a great closer,” he says. “But I’ve got so many songs left over, I’m still figuring out what to do with them.”
He’s not kidding. “I wrote 60 songs for this record. I don’t know what the hell to do with them all,” he says. Expect more b-sides, more catharsis, more of Fender’s blend of heartland rock and Geordie grit.
And maybe, just maybe, more mandolins.
Watch the interview above and then check out the videos below.
