Mansfield (Denmark) – Too much to handle (single) + video

Previously I’ve described Copenhagen-based Mansfield as “a potted history of contemporary British music over the latter half of the 20^th century… their influences so diverse that you’d think they were in danger of creating a monster out of the parts”, and qualified by the observation that, “they aren’t so much re-writing these eras as redefining them.”

I’m not the only one to have recognised their expertise. The Danish music magazine Gaffa labeled their second album ‘For All the Right Reasons’ (2024) as one of the Top Three albums of that year.

But those accolades at home stirred up a hornet’s nest of problems. The band members found themselves facing inner turmoil as they attempted to balance musical expectations, newfound pressures and family. It’s tough at the top as the saying goes and they were forced to reconsider their “purpose and direction”.

I’m guessing that might mean, inter alia, whether or not to cast caution to the winds and go full time as musicians or to continue to play it safe as semi-professionals with a regular job to go to on Monday morning and a 6am alarm call. Of course you can still get those for your executive chauffeur car to LAX once your gamble pays off and you’ve broken America.

As we’ve often seen in NMC, one remedy is to write a song about overwhelming pressures as a way of coming to terms with them and that is what Mansfield has done with this new single, ‘Too much to handle’, which was released on 20^th February. The title sums it all up perfectly and the lyrics leave little to the imagination:

“Are you ready to let go?

Is it way too much to handle?

There’s no need for you to know

What you’re going to dismantle”.

Mansfield are excellent storytellers, and always in plain English (singer Christian Stage at least has spent time here, including in the Nottinghamshire [ex-] coal mining town of Mansfield, from where the band takes its name).

The press release tells me they are more “assertive” on this single but I’m not sure. Their musical background embraces the England of the 1960s to the 1990s and I would place ‘Too much to handle’ in the introspective, melancholic 1980s, along with the likes of The Smiths and The Cure.

They have a habit, too, of dropping videos with little hints of imagery and allegory that embellish the lyrics. In this very professionally produced one, filmed in Copenhagen, and which symbolises chasing an undefined goal, Christian Stage appears to offer a little prayer even before it gets underway.

That imagery repetitively encompasses tunnels, one way streets with traffic lights flashing alternatively red for stop and green for go, blindfolds, and people tailing each other like spies. Or alter egos.

(Incidentally, one of the characters is played by Declan Land, a friend of the band who is appropriately from Mansfield!)

Will the outcome be revealed in a future album? We shall see.

The single is available on all digital platforms via record label DME.

To celebrate the release, Mansfield will perform with the British band All the Young at Rust in Copenhagen on February 27th, followed by further shows in Denmark and the UK throughout spring 2026.

Find them on:

Website: http://www.mansfield.dk/