Breakthrough British artist Sam Fender has well and truly made his mark with new six-track EP Dead Boys, and we recently heralded the “high-octane, intense, rock-laden” title-track, which we praised for its unflinching look at male suicide rates in the UK. Many of Fender’s songs are influenced by his experiences of living in Tyneside, and fellow EP track ‘Poundshop Kardashians’ is another social commentary delivered through the songwriter’s propulsive, spiralling style. Over marching drums and searing guitars, Fender takes a cynical view of a culture of plastic surgery, reality TV, gossip magazines, depicting the people who worship at the altar of fakery as “plastic action men and poundshop Kardashians.” While there’s an aspect of ridicule here, it’s done so with a message, as we hear in the cutting lyric, “We laugh at them disheveled on the front page of the Mail / We grab ourselves a pitchfork and go in for the kil, / Together write vigils, eulogize them on the internet / When they top themselves, when they couldn’t take it no more.” Sam Fender makes the point to put the onus on us, the general public, this hive mind, who so readily vilify and abandon the formerly celebrated. It’s another undeniably powerful and thought-provoking effort from Fender. - Hannah Thacker