Field Music – “Only In A Man’s World”

Field Music – “Only In A Man’s World”

The English rock band Field Music are releasing a new album, Making A New World, at the beginning of next year, the follow-up to 2018’s Open Here. It’s a concept album after the aftereffects of World War I, inspired by a trip to the Imperial War Museum in London, specifically the display of a document that showed soundwaves from munitions at the very start of the war.

“We imagined the lines from that image continuing across the next hundred years and we looked for stories which tied back to specific events from the war or the immediate aftermath,” the band’s David Brewis said in a statement. “In writing these songs, we felt we were pulling the war towards us — out of remembrance and into the everyday — into the now.”

For the album’s lead single, “Only In A Man’s World,” the band applies their funky, squelching aesthetic to menstrual pads and their origin from the war. Here’s what Brewis had to say about the song:

I found myself researching the development of sanitary pads – not a statement I’ve ever imagined myself making – and was surprised at how little the advertising material has changed in a hundred years. It’s still, Hey Ladies! Let’s not mention it too loudly but here is the perfect product to keep you feeling normal WHILE THE DISGUSTING, DIRTY THING HAPPENS. And you realise that it’s a kind of madness that a monthly occurrence for billions of women – something absolutely necessary for the survival of humanity – is seen as shameful or dirty – and is taxed MORE than razor blades?! At every stage of making this song, I had to ask myself, am I allowed to do this? Is it okay to do this? And I cringed in the next room when I first showed it to my wife. But I think confronting my own embarrassment is a pretty fundamental part of what the song is about.

Listen below.

TRACKLIST:
01 “Sound Ranging”
02 “Silence”
03 “Coffee Or Wine”
04 “Best Kept Garden”
05 “I Thought You Were Something Else”
06 “Between Nations”
07 “A Change Of Heir”
08 “Do You Read Me”
09 “From A Dream, Into My Arms”
10 “Beyond That Of Courtesy”
11 “A Shot To The Arm”
12 “A Common Language Pt 1″
13 “A Common Language Pt 2″
14 “Nikon Pt 1″
15 “Nikon Pt 2″
16 “If The Wind Blows Towards The Hospital”
17 “Only In A Man’s World”
18 “Money Is A Memory”
19 “An Independent State”

Making A New World is out 1/10 via Memphis Industries. Pre-order it here.

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