[10] On 7 July 2021, Fender announced his second album, Seventeen Going Under and released the title track as the lead single.

[23] The Guardian writer Alexis Petridis gave the album five out of five stars and named it his album of the week, calling it "urgent, incisive and brave when it would have been easier for Fender to deck out his festival-ready, TikTok-able melodies with something notably blander and less pointed" and "really powerful".

[24] Roisin O'Connor of The Independent felt that Fender had refined both "his songwriting and his sound" from his debut, calling the first six songs "far stronger" lyrically than the rest of the album, and summarised Fender as celebrating surviving the "politicised, polarised and [...] permanent state of anxiety" that the world is in.

[25] Journalist Ewan Gleadow, writing for Spark Sunderland, praised the album, calling it "An intense and passionate showcase of emotions" that provided an "understanding of growing up and out of past behaviours.

"[26] In Tribune magazine, academic and author Alex Niven wrote, “If there is a better, more painful, more condensed summary of the callousness of British neoliberalism in the times we have all recently lived through, I’m not aware of it.