Field Theory is the second studio album from Dublin four-piece Melts. 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 realization 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.”
