More about: Field Music

Once you’re an established artist, it’s only right to release a concept album. Something that will really flip the table, shuffle the cards, turn the world upside down. Sunderland’s enchanting duo, Field Music, are no exception to the rule with their seventh album Making a New World.

Inspired by the untold long-term consequences of the first world war, Making a New World transcends space and time. The 19-track chronicle is a voyage into a time of social renovation unfolding stories about returning home from war to gender reassignment surgery. 

In a playfully unorthodox fashion, Making a New World covers an expanse of musical ground. The album opens with ominous soundscapes intertwining, discordant piano and the hum of a radio before bouncing into the delightfully buoyant and painfully bittersweet ‘Coffee or Wine’. If you scratch below the surface of the ebullient piano, you’ll find abandon and hopelessness in the lyrics. And as the album progresses, Field Music start to sound startlingly more and more like Talking Heads with semi-spoken lyrics, tepid drums and 80s-esque harmonies filling out the tracks.  

Marking the halfway point is the last single ‘Do You Read Me?’ - a pivotal point of the shift in mood towards brilliance and high energy. 

Making a New World metamorphoses from these ambient piano-centric ballads to high-octane, funk floor-fillers that could get an eyebrow raise from Nile Rodgers. ‘Money is a Memory’, the penultimate part of the 19-part saga, absolutely bangs. It all feels very much like David Bowie’s ‘Fame’, and that’s not a bad thing at all. 

It’s safe to say that Making a New World will be a hallmark on Field Music’s repertoire - an retrospective think-piece that is also enthralling to listen to. 

Making a New World is released on 10 January 2020 via Memphis Industries. 

More about: Field Music