People Watching by Sam Fender

People Watching, Sam Fender's third album, arrived on Polydor on 21 February 2025, and it finds the North Shields songwriter going all in on heartland rock: big, open-road pop rock sung in a high tenor that never sands off the Geordie. Fender co-produced it with Adam Granduciel and Markus Dravs, with bandmates Dean Thompson and Joe Atkinson adding production of their own.

By his own telling, the songs are portraits of ordinary people whose lives turn out to be anything but. It spun off six singles, critics loved it, and it opened at number one in the UK, his third album in a row to do so, while going top ten in Germany, the Netherlands, Ireland and beyond. It took the Mercury Prize that October. Then "Rein Me In", re-cut as a duet with Olivia Dean, became his first UK number-one single, held the top spot for a record 23 weeks and won Song of the Year at the 2026 Brits.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.