Sam Fender: Seventeen Going Under | 4ZZZ Brisbane 102.1FM

- If you’re like me, news of a new album from a sincere white-boy singer-songwriter from the UK does not really prick the ears up.

But Sam Fender’s Seventeen Going Under is full of surprises. For one, he has spurned earnest acoustic indie in favour of an epic classic rock sound so in thrall to Bruce Springsteen he even has a sax solo on most songs. But more than that, Fender skips straight past confessions of love and heartbreak, to write about his experiences growing up in the post-industrial wasteland of smalltown northern England. In a thick Geordie accent, he narrates short stories that scratch the surface to uncover what it’s like to be a working class white man in the 21st century - and why it’s like that.

The opening title track is an extraordinary song - a slow buildup to a big whoa-oh crescendo, which lyrically covers an immense range of topics: the reckless fun and confused ennui of teenagehood, violence and anger, repressed emotions, fractured family relationships, economic circumstances leading young people into crime, the inhumanity of government bureaucracy, and the weight of being a young man experiencing all these things at once - hence the title and coda Seventeen Going Under.

Interestingly, that song acts as a kind of prologue for the rest of the album - with many of the themes expanded as the record goes on.

“That's the thing with anger, it begs to stick around… Makes you hurt the ones who love you” he sings, and Get You Down is a further examination of violence and that most masculine of emotions, shame. It finds the roots of domestic anger buried in repressed childhood humiliation.

Spit Of You is a depiction of father-son relationships. The chorus of “I can talk to anyone but I can’t talk to you” says a lot, but there is also an incredible description of rare displays of affection as “love in all its agony”. And the cycle replicates with each generation.

Fender certainly is aware of social injustices. Long Way Off in its expression of political disillusionment though is maybe the most pertinent, at a time when working class people are abandoning old political solidarity for populism and conspiracy theories. Aye is the album’s most traditionally political moment, raging at the “very few who never had time for me and you”. But the most incisive line in the song is “the woke kids are just dickheads” - a sentiment felt by so many working class people when a particular understanding of the world is passed off as a standard of morality.

That line also indicates a development in Fender’s songwriting as the 27 year old grows into his own voice. On previous album Hypersonic Missiles, he had a song titled White Privilege that somewhat clumsily tried to grapple with his own status as a white male. This time around, the politics are better expressed in his story-telling - another trick he might have picked up from Bruce Springsteen.

Not every song on Seventeen Going Under is equally amazing, and the first half of the album is definitely better than the second. I’ll give him points for ambition, mind you, on album closer The Dying Light - an attempt to channel Springsteen’s most ridiculously over-the-top moments. But most tracks at least contain an interesting lyrical direction.

Fender has said the forced isolation of COVID lockdown encouraged him to explore his own past and make a more personal record. But Seventeen Going Under is not self-indulgent - he is able to identify common experiences and their causes, and the result is a remarkably perceptive album.

Even better, and here is another trait he may have inherited from Bruce Springsteen, is these analyses of working class life are delivered in catchy, uplifting, classic sounding rock songs - a medium very much beloved of working class people. I hope this album reaches the loungerooms and pubs of the mainstream, because there its insights may start to transform the lives of young people like Sam Fender - burdened with the inherited flaws and injustices of the world, unable to see paths out of their circumstances, Seventeen Going Under.

- Andy Paine.