Field Music release Limits of Language, their first album of new music for almost four years. Back in 2022, the touring cycle for the Flat White Moon album ended with a sense of finality. For the first time since the Mercury-nominated Plumb ten years earlier, Peter and David had no plan for what, if anything, would come next. However, after six years of continuation, they were clear that if Field Music was to carry on then it would have to be different, in both sound and scope. Solo projects followed with 2023 seeing the arrival of David’s quietly-jazzy Soft Struggles, the playful of electronica of Peter’s Blowdry Colossus alongside a limited-issue brass collaboration LP Binding Time and the vault-raiding John Monroe EP, made with original Field Music keyboard player Andrew Moore. It was these albums that provided fresh impetus for what was to become the new Field Music record. Whilst Peter amassed the instrumental compositions which become Blowdry Colossus, he was also tinkering with a batch of songs which would form the basis of Limits of Language, songs which mixed synthesised textures with off-the-cuff flickers of guitar and layers of disorientating found-sound percussion. These fleshed-out demos included The Waitress of St Louis’, an ode to the now-closed Sunderland café ’Louis’, which featured on the cover of their 2007 album Tones of Town, and to the Maggiore family who ran this cherished institution. David’s songs came from a different angle but leant into the same sonic palette and shared the same sense of a past becoming granulated. Album opener, Six Weeks, Nine Wells pits the hazy ecstasies of school summer holidays against the fear and foreboding of a child peeking through into an adult world.
