Making a New World is the seventh studio album by English rock band Field Music. It was released through Memphis Industries on 10 January 2020. The songs were originally composed by David and Peter Brewis for a project commissioned by the Imperial War Museum. The album is about the after-effects of World War I and how they impacted the 100 years after the war's end. It is considered the band's first concept album.
The starting point for the museum project was an image called "The End of the War", a visualisation of the vibrations from when gunfire ceased at the exact moment that the war ended. After conducting research, the Brewis brothers decided against writing songs broadly about World War I. They instead focused on individual stories inspired by technological, political, sociological, and cultural advancements over the course of the next century that directly or indirectly stemmed from the war.
A variety of topics are addressed in the songs on Making a New World, including war reparations, social housing reforms, women's suffrage, the Dada movement, the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre, sanitary napkins, gender realignment operations, and the development of technologies such as ultrasound, synthesisers, and air-to-ground radio communication. The primary recordings for the album came from two real-time band run-throughs by Field Music, recorded in a single day shortly after the original museum performances. The band's guitarist Kevin Dosdale designed visuals used for the former's tour dates and the museum shows.
Making a New World features a diverse mix of styles, genres, and instruments, as well as multiple shifts in mood and tone, sophisticated vocal harmony, and brief instrumental vignettes. The album received generally positive reviews from music critics and was praised for the ambition and originality, with Field Music being complimented for making such lofty subject matter enjoyable. Some critics were more negative, saying it was the wrong platform for the concept, or that too many ideas were contained to form a cohesive album.
Background and development
Released through Field Music's label Memphis Industries, Making a New World is about the after-effects of World War I, and is considered the band's first concept album. The songs were originally composed from a project that Field Music prepared for the Imperial War Museum (IWM), which commissioned music as part of its Making a New World season commemorating the centenary of the end of the war and its effects on society afterwards. The program ultimately inspired the name of the album, as did the painting "We Are Making a New World" by war artist Paul Nash. The latter depicts the consequences of war without explicitly showing the conflict itself, which David said was consistent with the band's approach to the album's music. He said the title Making a New World also refers to the many ways in which the world was changed by World War I.
The IWM originally planned to commission the Fall for the project, but when the group's founder Mark E. Smith died, they were forced to seek another band. Andy Martin, who had made music videos for Field Music in the past, was acquainted with officials from the museum and introduced them to the band. The Brewis brothers were not previously familiar with the IWM, and they were initially skeptical about the proposed commission, but became more comfortable with the project after visiting the IWM North branch and discussing it. Although David said Field Music wrote the songs "to order", he said "it didn't feel like hack work". The latter had previously produced works based upon World War I, including a collaboration with the band Warm Digits, and the Royal Northern Sinfonia on a score for Asunder (2016), a film directed by Esther Johnson about the war's effects on a small English town. However, David said his knowledge about World War I was limited to his high school studies and explained this by claiming that "the way you see things at high school: you pay a bit of attention, you find it interesting, but you don't think too deeply about it".
In the spring of 2018, the IWM formally commissioned Field Music to create a commemorative sound and light show based upon a picture about munitions from a 1919 publication by the United States Department of War. The image, entitled "The End of the War", showed a visualisation of the vibrations caused by gunfire during the exact moment of 11 a.m. on 11 November 1918, the moment at which the armistice that ended the war went into effect. The image was created using a technique called sound ranging that used transducers to detect the vibrations, then displayed the distances between peaks with lines on a graph to show the location of enemy armaments. It illustrated one minute of harsh and intense noise, followed by near silence for the same amount of time. David described the image as "this tiny, incomplete fragment, not much more than a moment, but one which could be both the beginning and the ending of a huge story". The band also said this image was both the starting point for their songs and "the start of a new world". David stated that they imagined the lines from the 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 Brewis brothers began conducting research in September 2018, a process David described as "amateurish", which mostly entailed searching the Internet for stories about the after-effects of World War I. Field Music originally considered creating a primarily instrumental piece; Peter said his initial vision was "something slightly improvised" that drew upon music from the time period of World War I, such as jazz and orchestral works during the Belle Époque, including Igor Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring (1913). However, the brothers' research ultimately inspired them to write songs with lyrics telling specific stories. David said their research led them to subjects that they "couldn't help but write songs about". The music was researched, composed, and prepared in a three-month span between September and December 2018, a faster process than usual for Field Music, but one David described as "liberating" because they had less time to dwell on it. The lyrics were fact-checked by the museum for historical accuracy and fixed some errors, for which David expressed gratitude.
The arrangements were not finalised before the Brewis brothers presented them to other members of Field Music, another deviation from the former's usual procedure due to time restraints; the brothers first discussed the songs and visual elements of the performances with the band aboard a ferry while returning from a festival in Ireland. The visuals were finalised after Christmas of 2018, and revolved around a backdrop animated by Field Music's guitarist Kevin Dosdale, with collaboration from Andy Martin. Visualisations of vibrations similar to those used in "The End of the War" image were projected onto the walls as the band performed, as well as explanatory text about the stories behind individuals songs that they played. Minor changes were made to the music during rehearsals. The songs were first performed at the IWM sites in Salford and London on 24 January and 31 January 2019, respectively.
Field Music did not originally plan to compile the songs into an album, but decided to do so because they felt the music was equally as strong as their previous works. David voiced the belief that Christmas of 2018 was when he first considered the idea of an album, though Peter said the idea did not occur to him until the band actually recorded the songs shortly after the IWM performances. It marked the first time Field Music had made an album from the music that they had been commissioned by an outside party to write. David called it a surprise, and the band has jokingly referred to Making a New World as feeling like an "accidental record" as a result.
Lyrics and themes Individual stories After accepting the commission from the IWM, David and Peter Brewis decided against making music entirely and specifically focused on World War I itself because they felt pop music was not the right vehicle for telling a broad story about such a large topic. Instead, the Brewis brothers decided to approach the project similarly to how they write their usual songs, which is by focusing upon smaller stories. David said of this: "We can't tell the story of the First World War, we certainly can't tell the story of a century after the first World War and everything that came from it, but we can pick little stories, and find ways that maybe they can express something much bigger." This approach, which Peter acknowledged was "fairly esoteric" and "niche", was partially inspired by the brothers visiting the IWM in person and seeing the many stories told there.
In writing the songs, the brothers researched stories, events, and advances that occurred during and after World War I, and picked moments over the course of the next 100 years that they could tie back as a direct or indirect effect of the war. David described the songs as an attempt to "capture the echoes of the First World War in all the time since". The songs identify technological, political, sociological, and cultural advancements over the course of the century and link them back to the World War I, demonstrating the long-standing consequences of that conflict. David said of Making a New World: "The whole album is really about consequences, and how the consequences of that war are still with us." He also said that he and Peter were surprised at the extent to which World War I influenced so much of the 20th century: "In some ways, things have changed a lot. But in some ways, we are still very much living in the world shaped by that conflict in that time." The album largely presents these stories in chronological order, starting with those immediately after the war ended, and concluding with the present day.
David and Peter each picked their own subjects to focus upon and develop into songs, and at no point did either brother object to the other's selections, which Peter attributed to a mutual trust between the two. David was the primary composer of songs such as "Best Kept Garden", "Coffee or Wine", "Do You Read Me?", "Money Is a Memory", and "Only in a Man's World", while Peter was the main composer of other songs, including "A Change of Heir", "A Shot in the Arm", "I Thought You Were Someone Else", "Nikon, Pt. 1", and "Nikon, Pt. 2". Finding and choosing the stories they liked was one of the biggest challenges of the process for the brothers. Writing songs based upon the researching of topics was a different approach than usual for Field Music, but the Brewis brothers claimed they enjoyed the change of pace. David said working on Making a New World "might be the first time we've thought of ourselves as songwriters or lyricists, rather than people who make records". David's and Peter's mother had died in March 2018, and after that, the brothers did not feel capable of writing songs inspired by their normal lives as they usually did, so David said the IWM commission was well-timed because "looking at different subjects from a different angle was ideal".