Gently Tender share Don't Sleep ahead of an October album

Gently Tender have shared Don't Sleep, the newest song from This Was Once Fields, the album they release on October 16. The single arrives ahead of a full UK tour in November, and it carries the same subject the album is built on.

The lyrics came out of walking. Songwriter Sam Fryer wrote them on long routes around the green belt that rings the edge of London, and the record turned into an examination of his push and pull relationship with the city rather than a set of songs about it.

The song sounds like the hour it describes. Its subdued arrangement conjures an inky, twilight atmosphere, and it finds something worth looking at in a version of London that rarely gets written about, the outskirts rather than the centre.

Fryer's own account of it is specific. He said it is about the feeling of driving through a city at night, and that he calls it an Uber Pop song because it always sounds to him like being in a late night cab.

He is candid that the affection is not straightforward. He described wrestling between love and hate for the city, said the line about loving the place is almost delivered through gritted teeth, and added that after years of struggling with London he has to acknowledge how it shaped him artistically.

British guitar bands writing about the specific geography of where they live has become a recognisable strand of UK indie, and Gently Tender sit in it without much fuss. The October date is on the release calendar, in a month that also carries The Avalanches' No Bad Memories on 16 October, while Manchester's The Guest List released the single Mundane around the same stretch.