'Field Theory' is the second studio album from Dublin four-piece MELTS, due for release April 12th 2024 on Fuzz Club. Recorded live to tape at Black Mountain Studios in Summer 2023 and produced by Gilla Band's Daniel Fox, it's a collection of turbulent electronic psych-rock shaped by bulldozing motorik synth lines, densely layered guitars, primal percussion and the cavernous vocals of frontman Eoin Kenny. While their highly-praised 2022 debut ‘Maelstrom’ dealt with forces on a larger scale affecting a whole city, ‘Field Theory’ explores connections on a smaller, interpersonal scale.

The title takes the scientific term ‘Field Theory’, which describes how forces interact and influence particles around them, and applies it to the interactions between people, to the space between all of us, how people interact and affect others around them. Expanding on the album’s themes, MELTS write: “Like gravity we are drawn to and miss people and like light waves we love people and are loved. We live in orbits of each other, drawn by unseen forces. The album explores these forces, how we relate to each other, the people we live with and the people we live without. At the heart of Field Theory lies the realisation that we inhabit each other's worlds as much as our own, through a field of wide-ranging forces, as important as the ones keeping the planets in place.”

TRACK LISTING

1. Figment
2. Waves Of Wonder
3. Clouded
4. WLDNG
5. Shelter Of The Shade
6. Main Sequence
7. Altered
8. The Never
9. Softly Breathes

Dublin five-piece MELTS announce their debut album produced by Daniel Fox of Gilla Band (FKA Girl Band). 

“Repetition is definitely the key to Melts,” says Gaz Earle. “It’s about just keeping it simple and driving and fucking stomping.” Earle (drums) makes up the Dublin five-piece along with Robbie Brady (keys/synth), Colm Giles (bass), Kenny (vocals) and Hugh O'Reilly (guitar). "Outlier is about the distance between, like the imaginable distance between objects in space and how leaving one way of life and moving on to another life falling into space, into the void. The title refers to an object or person existing at a distance from the centre of the system."This idea of keeping it simple has been woven into the fabric of the band since day one. Different line-ups were tried and experimented with and after an immediate connection at a rehearsal, Kenny was quickly in as singer. The inclusion of Kenny who, like all the other members have been in various other bands, unlocked something new and distinct in the group. Then once Brady joined on keys, an even more evolved tone to the band began to take shape.

What became clear was the band quickly outgrew their initial intentions of being a garage rock outfit. The raw, simplistic, primal nature of that approach remained intact but soon they expanded into immersive pulsing grooves. “We wanted to keep the rhythms just really straight and hypnotic,” says Earle. “The aim of the game was to try and get people into a trance when they are watching the gig. With bringing Robbie on board, as he's doing loads of stuff with sequencers and deadly synth bits, there grew a psychedelic hypnotic vibe to Melts.” A friend described the band as like a space rock version of The Doors, which they didn’t balk at.

Lyrically the album weaves between big picture state-of-the-world stuff to the more introspective and personal. The former can be heard on opener ‘Maelstrom’ which is about, according to Kenny, “a storm that sweeps through a town one day and causes an irreversible change to the order of things he song written from the point of view of someone caught in currents, beyond their own making and understanding the frustrations felt by someone who feels powerless against the effects of the upheaval.” ‘Spectral’, on the other hand, one of the album’s most tender moments that unfurls slowly with Kenny’s rich and resonant vocal delivery, is a track dedicated to the loss of a friend to suicide. As a whole, Kenny says, “the theme of the record is kind of based on coming to grips with the world around us.”

The end result is an album that gracefully yet potently merges psych rock with touches of post-rock-esque soundscapes, pulsing krautrock, all of which is driven by demented organ wig outs, engulfing waves of heavily textured guitar and a crisp rhythm section. While they land on a sound that is distinctly their own, their debut occupies something of a middle ground between Spacemen 3 and Primary Colours-era The Horrors. Or, as the band say themselves, something that sounds “driving and fucking stomping.” 

TRACK LISTING

Side A
A1 Maelstrom
A2 Signal
A3 Outlier
A4 Circular
Side B
B1 Spectral
B2 Waltzer
B3 Skyward
B4 Tides