Gently Tender set their second album This Was Once Fields for October 16

Gently Tender have announced their second album, This Was Once Fields, for release on October 16 through TODO Records, and put out a single called Don't Sleep alongside the news.

The London band told DIY the song came out of frontman Sam Fryer's late night journeys across the city. "I call it an Uber Pop song," he said, "because whenever I listen to it, it sounds like I'm in a late-night cab." Fryer said the line about loving the place arrives almost through gritted teeth.

That pull between affection and irritation runs through the rest of the record. Fryer wrote much of it after walking the green belt north of London to get out of the noise and look back at the city from the countryside around it.

Don't Sleep follows two earlier tracks from the same body of work, A Mound A Field and Wild In The Uplands. This Was Once Fields is billed as the band's first new music since 2023, and it now sits on the release calendar with the rest of the autumn slate.

An 11-date headline tour of the UK and Ireland follows in November. It opens at the Bodega in Nottingham on November 2 and takes in Norwich, Sheffield, Birmingham, Dublin, Glasgow, Newcastle, Leeds, Manchester and Winchester before closing at The Louisiana in Bristol on November 14. Dove Ellis has booked a comparable UK and Ireland run for the same stretch of the year.

Gently Tender play the kind of guitar music that files under indie without much argument, and the November run puts the new songs in small rooms rather than the festival tents where a lot of their peers spent the summer.