Sam Fender has today (16 April) announced his debut album Hypersonic Missiles. Another monumental milestone for the BRIT Award winner who sells out shows in seconds, the singer has crafted his most raw and visceral material to date for the release.
Out on 9 August via Polydor, and boasting 13 tracks (‘Hypersonic Missiles’ / ‘The Borders’ / ‘White Privilege’ / ‘Dead Boys’ / ‘You’re Not The Only One’ / ‘Play God’ / ‘That Sound’ / ‘Saturday’ / ‘Will We Talk In The Morning’ / ‘Two People’ / 'Call Me Lover’ / ‘Leave Fast’ / ‘Use (live)’), the singer tells Gigwise this record is “a snapshot of the last five years”. We had a chat with Sam ahead of the announcement, and this is what we know so far:
It was mostly recorded the singer’s own purpose built studio
“It was produced by Bramwell Bronte, he’s my close friend and I love him very much. Me and him started this whole thing together really, we self-produced everything and that’s part of the reason that I signed with Polydor, because other labels were edging me to go and work with other people. I put my foot down and Polydor said don’t fix what isn’t broken, so Bramwell Bronte does everything. It was recorded in North Shields in a studio that I built myself, we did everything at home.”
Sam recorded the majority of the instruments himself
“There’s the odd guitar part that Dean does, Joe has done a little bit of synth and French Tom has played a couple of tracks, but the majority of the bass I do myself. I just do everything myself because I wrote the parts so I know how I want them played. I don’t play the strings and the saxophone because I can’t, but if I could play the saxophone I probably would do it myself. When you’ve got a vision you trust yourself.”
There are some interesting samples
“We had a load of spanners and tools on top of a tea chest and I started smacking it and it sounded great. There’s quite a lot of saxophone, loads of strings but nothing too crazy I wouldn’t think, apart from the tea chest. That was a random one just because it was in the shed.”
“The whole album is a snapshot of the last five years”
“The first half of the album is my favourite half because that’s got all of the stuff I like on it [laughs], then towards the back end there’s a couple of songs that I wrote years and years ago and I feel like I have a duty to the fans to put them on. The whole album is a snapshot of the last five years, the oldest songs on the album were written five years ago when I was 19 and then some of the later ones were written two or three months ago. The very last track was written three months ago whilst I was recording the album.”
It’s a guerilla record
“The earlier tracks on the record were recorded before we had the studio, when I recorded things through a shitty 50 quid interface and a shit mic and it somehow ended up sounding good. Some of it was done in a shed, some of it was done in my mam’s front room. It’s a guerilla record that’s for sure. You can hear the desperation in it, it sounds great, I’m so fucking proud of it.”
Hypersonic Missiles is released on 09 August 2019 via Polydor Records.
