By means of the top of June 2025, Sam Fender can have performed 4 stadium presentations to almost 250,000 folks throughout the United Kingdom, with 3 of the ones in his local north east. With 3 albums and over 2 billion streams, his song has earned popular acclaim. But, Fender isn’t any strange rock celebrity.
His songs supply an impressive connection to position and a lens wherein to replicate on social, cultural and political dynamics. Deeply rooted in north-east England, Fender’s lyrics reference his homeland of North Shields and use native vernacular.
As a researcher of the hyperlinks between pop culture and politics who lives not up to a mile from his homeland, I to find his paintings specifically robust in how it mobilises emotive problems at scale. Fender explores issues corresponding to masculinity, poverty and on a regular basis fight, forging an immediate emotional connection together with his target audience.
This connection is bolstered via his activism. Fender helps native meals banks, the Teenage Most cancers Agree with, and campaigns for poverty aid and males’s psychological well being.
To my thoughts, this paintings isn’t performative celebratory activism, however is grounded in his personal neighborhood and private studies. This mixture of business good fortune rooted in honesty, vulnerability and neighborhood motion ended in him being named “freeman of North Tyneside” in Would possibly 2025.
Girls and boys are in combination dealing with an unsure international. However analysis presentations they’re diverging with regards to attitudes about masculinity, feminism and gender equality.
Social media, politics, and id all play a job. However what’s truly happening with girls and boys? Sign up for The Dialog UK and Cumberland Resort’s Formative years and Democracy venture at Newcastle College for a dialogue of those problems with younger folks and educational professionals. Tickets to be had right here.
Fender’s teenage years have been marked via non-public demanding situations, together with his folks’ separation and his mom’s fibromyalgia. Those studies, and the state’s failure to beef up the ones in want, are captured in his tune Seventeen Going Beneath (2021): “I came home and you were on the floor / Floored by the letters and the council rigmarole.”
His newest album, Other folks Observing (2025), continues this critique. The identify observe, impressed via the dying of an in depth buddy in a care house, laments:
Where used to be fallin’ to bits
Understaffed and overruled via callous arms
The deficient nurse used to be across the clock
And the wonderful thing about early life had left my breaking middle.
The song video for Other folks Observing.
For Fender, those tales replicate a Britain in decline. In Crumbling Empire, he sings: “Road like the surface of the moon / A Detroit neighbourhood left to ruin.” The tune additional reviews a society that fails to honour those that have given the whole lot:
My mom delivered maximum the youngsters on this the town
My step-dad drove in a tank for the crown
They left them homeless, down and out
Of their crumbling empire.
His message is apparent: exhausting paintings, even via midwives and warfare heroes, now not promises dignity or praise.
Fender’s maximum poignant observations are rooted in his locality. In Nostalgia’s Lie, he sings: “These streets break my heart / There’s pain unfurling and desperate yearning / For all my friends who are gone.”
North Shields has one of the vital very best charges of kid poverty in the United Kingdom. In step with the North East Kid Poverty Fee (March 2025), 31% of youngsters within the area lived beneath the poverty line between 2021 and 2024.
Searching for one thing just right? Reduce during the noise with a moderately curated collection of the most recent releases, are living occasions and exhibitions, instantly in your inbox each and every fortnight, on Fridays. Join right here.
On this context, Fender puts psychological well being – particularly male psychological well being – on the core of his paintings, made much more robust via his honesty about his personal struggles.
Useless Boys displays each non-public loss and the epidemic of male suicide in North Tyneside: “We close our eyes, learn our pain / Nobody ever could explain / All the dead boys in our hometown.”
In One thing Heavy, he provides: “My friends reached for the rope and tied / Oh, God, how can we keep missing signals?”
Fender plays Useless Boys in Manchester.
Fender’s engagement with psychological well being is deeply non-public. He wrestles with confusion, despondency, and his personal sense of vanity: “Though I am a soundboard to some / With myself I am not so forgiving” (Final to Make it House), and “Sometimes I wanna die, sometimes” (Paradigms).
In Just right Corporate, he confesses: “Sometimes I cry until there’s no sound,” and in Arm’s Period: “Do you have to know me, know me, inside out / I’m selfish, and I’m lonely.”
But, like many artists, Fender feels guilt that good fortune has uprooted him. In Wild Lengthy Lie, he displays: “Oh, I’ve got so much pain here, yet so much love / But it’s drownin’ every inch of my soul.” He questions whether or not he can nonetheless authentically elevate those problems now that reputation has distanced him from his previous. As he places it in Crumbling Empire:
I’m now not preaching, I’m simply speaking
I don’t put on the sneakers I used to stroll in
However I will’t lend a hand considering the place I’d be
On this crumbling empire.
Fender’s paintings is helping us perceive political and social phenomena via reflecting unfolding occasions. His songs may also be noticed as giving existence and voice to what political theorist Michael Shapiro calls an “aesthetic subject”.
The characters in his songs, whether or not autobiographical or imagined, give voice to communities which can be so regularly omitted. They enable exploration of the buildings of energy that deny working-class folks alternatives, contributing to psychological well being crises, suicide and spiralling drug use inside the ones communities.
Sam Fender talks about males’s psychological well being.
Despite the fact that Fender recognizes he now not walks in the similar sneakers, his songs nonetheless talk reality to energy. They offer voice to studies which are regularly omitted and divulge the expanding fight of on a regular basis existence in the United Kingdom and past.
He additionally provides a nuanced mirrored image on masculinity. Fender demanding situations conventional beliefs – rational, authoritative, emotionally restrained – whilst rejecting simplified portrayals of guys as vulnerable or risky. His songs expose a masculinity this is complicated, conflicted and deeply human.
Whilst Fender isn’t by myself in the usage of song for social statement, what units him aside is his skill to channel the spirit of his area people to discover common issues. His paintings reviews the disasters of recent capitalism to supply dignity, recognize, and brotherly love – problems that resonate deeply amid lately’s cultural, political and financial demanding situations.
