No difficult second album syndrome for Dublin quartet, Melts, who come screaming out of the traps on the follow-up to 2022’s Maelstrom. Produced by Gilla Band’s Daniel Fox, Field Theory is a storming fusion of bruising krautrock, distorted guitars, electro-clash rhythms, military time signatures and a barrage of synths. It feels like a hybrid of Joy Division and Fontaines D.C.

Vocalist Eoin Kenny snarls and howls his way through the opening ‘Figment’, a magnificent, propulsive, goth-influenced synth odyssey of crashing guitars and pulsing beats, and the subsequent ‘Waves Of Wonder’, which bludgeons its way into your consciousness without asking twice.

Elsewhere, drummer Gaz Earle and keyboard/synth wizard Robbie Brady combine their talents with Hugh O’Reilly’s abrasive guitar to create quite the hypnotic swirl on the Joy Division-style tattoo of ‘Clouded’; the distortion-heavy ‘Main Sequence’; and the discordantly frenetic ‘Altered’, the latter seeming to evoke anxiety in musical form. The chugging electronic bluster of ‘Shelter Of The Shade’ drives relentlessly, before cascading keyboards break into your consciousness, with the quartet only really stopping for air on the closing, funereal dirge of ‘Softly Breathes’.

Impressively uncompromising.

8/10