Sam Tompkins has a new album, and an open invitation from The Fray

Sam Tompkins released his second album today. ARE WE GONNA SING? is twelve songs on Island Records, his first record since 2024, and the one "Beauty Queen" and "Body to Body" have been trailing all summer.

By the time it had been out a few hours, The Fray had asked him to come on tour with them.

"Sam!! We're touring Europe/UK this fall, wanna play some shows with us?" the band posted on TikTok, addressed to nobody in particular and to exactly one person. Two hours later Tompkins posted his own video back: "THE ANSWER IS YES YES YES YES." That is the entire negotiation so far. No dates, no venues, no announcement from either label, no press release.

The record he actually made

It was made with people in a room. Humble The Great produced it, with Manta, HARGS and Mac Jamieson, and Tompkins has described the sessions as jam-led and built on live playing rather than assembled afterwards: "I realised I wanted the entire project to feel alive and honest."

The record is wider than the story around it. "Beauty Queen" is about his partner, Lily. "Crawling Out My Skin" he describes as something that arrived rather than something he planned: "It wasn't a concept I'd had deep in my journal. It was a moment." "Heated Seats" came out of childhood afternoons driving to car boot sales and football matches with his dad. Then "Body to Body", "Caught In The Middle", "Little Boy", "5 O'Clock Somewhere", and the closing track, which is where the title comes from.

The closing track is called "Live Where I Don't Lose You", and it ends on a home video. The voice in it is his father's, asking: are we gonna sing? His father died in November 2023, and Tompkins told people himself, at the time and since, what had happened: his dad took his own life after what he called a lifelong battle with his inner demons. Two weeks later he played the biggest headline show of his career, at the Eventim Apollo in London. "It was the toughest, but most rewarding night of my life," he wrote afterwards.

He has been deliberate about saying it out loud rather than around it. Releasing the single "phones in heaven" a few months later, he explained why: "To show others that they are not alone in their struggles and that we can all get through these things if we just open up conversation."

He kept working through 2024 and into 2025, and then he stepped back. He has described that himself, and it is worth using his framing rather than anyone else's: "I took a step back from my work and just looked inside to see what I really liked about my job, because sometimes with the expectations of social media it can be hard to constantly project this like, I'm good, I'm happy, I'm doing well."

Three years of one song

The invitation came out of a cover, and the cover is not on the album. Tompkins first posted himself singing "How to Save a Life" in March 2023, captioned "the older i get, the more this song hits". Then he posted it again. And again, most recently in December 2024, because people kept asking for it. It was the kind of clip an artist half resents: the thing that travels further than anything you wrote yourself.

On 21 August he stopped fighting it and released it properly, as an Island Records single. It entered the New Zealand Hot Singles chart at number seven the following week. A three-year-old phone video, cleared, mastered and sent out as a record, one week before the album.

The comment thread underneath is where it turned. A fan wrote: "Don't tell The Fray, but I like yours better." The Fray turned up in the same thread and replied: "Agreed." Tompkins liked it enough to screenshot the exchange into a new video of the cover on 26 August. Eight days later the band asked him on tour.

What he has actually said yes to

The Fray's Autumn Light Tour opens on 27 October in Poland and runs through Germany, Sweden, France, Italy, Switzerland and Belgium before finishing in November in Bristol, London, Glasgow and Manchester. It was announced with "special guests to be announced", and as of this morning no support act has been named. Tompkins has an obvious gap: his own headline run, seven small rooms from Dublin to Amsterdam, ends on 18 October.

Worth knowing who is asking. The Fray in 2026 are a trio: Joe King on lead vocals and guitar, with Ben Wysocki and Dave Welsh. Isaac Slade, the voice on "How to Save a Life", left in 2022. So the band inviting Tompkins to come and sing it are the band who kept going after the man who sang it walked away.

Five shows since 2022, and the first one was ours

Colin has been following Sam since he was busking on Brighton streets alongside Ren, years before either of them had a record deal. So when Tompkins played Lido in Berlin in March 2022, getting into that room was not a routine accreditation request. Two applications came back no. The third came back yes, and that became the first show Coda ever photographed.

Four more followed. Superbloom in Munich that September, Kesselhaus in Berlin in December 2023, Lollapalooza Berlin in September 2024, and Hoxton Hall in London this April. Seventy-four frames across five nights, from a Berlin club to a festival main stage and back down to a room of 250.

That last one is why this week makes sense. On 30 April he played Hoxton Hall, a Victorian music hall that holds about 250 people, more than a thousand of whom had signed up for it inside three days. It was one of the first shows of his return, in a room a fraction of the size of the Apollo he had headlined in 2023.

That night was a trial run. Most of what he played was unreleased, and he was visibly nervous with it. Putting songs nobody has heard yet in front of 250 people is a more exposing thing than an arena, and he did not pretend otherwise.

If any of this is close to home: in the UK, Samaritans are on 116 123, free, day or night. In the Netherlands, 113 Zelfmoordpreventie is on 113 or 0800 0113.

Photographs: @annnlies and @colindarbyshir3.