Sam Fender’s newest music video is beautifully chaotic and perfectly fitting

Singer-songwriter Sam Fender has released a music video to accompany his single ‘Howdon Aldi Death Queue’.

A fast-paced rager that’s a stark contrast to it’s far gentler sister single ‘Seventeen Going Under’, ‘Death Queue’ is a punk rock roller coaster coming in at only one minute and fifty-seven seconds but not at all lacking in anything.

The accompanying music video as I’ve said before is perfectly fitting. It’s this choppy, slightly claustrophobic, Edgar Wright-esque masterpiece that captures all the emotion and the tension of the song. The video is a destructive romp that was shot in one take and stars Fender as well as Robson Green and Tom Brittney. Fender himself stated "We recorded this two-minute punk monster of a track in one take. It was basically a joke that went too far, but I’m so glad it did/ We had an absolute riot causing carnage in that supermarket!"

Lyrically, the song has this very sardonic, tongue in cheek sort of humour. It’s this sarcastic commentary that simply pokes fun at the state things have been in for the past however many months, something that I’m sure anyone who hasn’t been living under a rock for the last year and a half can appreciate. Fender takes the rather mundane task of going grocery shopping and ramps up the pedanticism to a point where it becomes absurd. The over the top chorus of “Woah woah woah woah woah woah woah/ Keep your distance/ Woah woah woah woah woah/ That's less than two meters”  becomes a mad plea that is quickly drowned out by a wave of drums, guitars and surprisingly saxophone that form the unrelenting soundtrack to the scenes that play out within this ‘Howdon Aldi Death Queue’.

The song also makes callbacks to ‘Seventeen Going Under’ as Fender sings ‘I'm twenty-five going on ninety-five/ Yeah I'm twenty-five going on ninety-five and I wanna die’. It’s both morbid and comedic, the sort of black humour we all need under the current circumstances, but it also serves to create that feeling that things are moving faster than you can keep up with, a sentiment I feel that the song subtly tries to address from beneath the layers of absurd comedy and faux panic. 

Despite the recent covid restrictions, Fender is back to playing live, recently performing at Boardmasters Festival in Cornwall alongside big names such as Foals, Gorillaz, The Kooks and Slowthai. His sophomore LP, ‘Seventeen Going Under’ is set to be released October 8th and is, in his own words from an interview with NME this year, “leagues ahead” of his debut album ‘Hypersonic Missiles’.

Morgan Springer 

Image: Joseph Okpako/WireImage