Catching a Case of Dance Fever
An album born to the pandemic, Dance Fever finds Florence + The Machine both entertaining and battling her demons of love and the life she lives. Entrenched in her own misery while locked away, Florence has come forward with her greatest album to date lyrically, battling constant pulls between pleasure and pain as she finds reverie in the madness and blissful explosions of emotion.
Lead single “King” begins the album with sweeping statements of Welch’s own view of herself as she ages. She argues with both the world and herself as she belts out the expectations of women and how as the titular King she has fought them, sharing both her pride and fury in the choices she has made to pursue her music and not a family. In an interview with NPR, Florence discussed the lyrics of this song stating “For me, it definitely felt like I would have to choose, depending on how I wanted to use my body for the next couple of years. And the rage was so acute. It was frustration as well. Just the frustration, which I think is the scream at the end of it. I think a reading of this song would be to oversimplify it, to be like she's against these things. I am not a mother, I'm not a bride. And the rage is not that I'm against them, it's the rage that actually, I feel completely split. I feel like I'm being torn in two.” Her fury ebbs and flows throughout the track, with a soft chorus as Welch seems to resign herself to the weight of her misery before suddenly flooring into the bridge blaring screams of emotion. The divide between these two possible iterations of herself tears through Florence, especially as she knows her music will triumph over her quiet wishes to explore life as a mother.
Is this how it is?
Is this how it's always been?
To exist in the face of suffering and death
And somehow still keep singing?
Free
“Free” finds Florence discussing her anxiety and how it goes away while she is creating and performing music. With a flood of power, Florence loses herself in the passion of her work, commenting on how hard life is but how she can lose all that pain to her music. Her anxiety feels like a consistent pulse in the beginning of the track as she considers being medicated, but throughout the track this pulse turns into a carefree explosion of her whims and experiences, allowing Welch to release all of her energy and transform it into pure radiance. The music video stars actor Bill Nighy visualizing her shadow of anxiety as Florence struggles through his pull and dances in moments of freedom. The video is especially poignant due to being filmed in Kyiv before war broke out, and the ending dedicates the entire video “to the spirit, creativity and perseverance of our brave Ukrainian friends” and then states the filming occurred “with Ukrainian filmmakers and artists, whose radiant freedom can never be extinguished”.
Track three, titled “Choreomania,” is in many senses the titular track of Dance Fever. Right before COVID-19 lockdown, Florence learned of the history of choreomania from a friend and dove into the topic full force, enthralled with the idea of quite literally dancing yourself to death. Welch takes this concept in various directions, both the need to lose her own inhibitions and finding ecstasy in movement, but also in the more historical sense of being compelled to move without explanation or the ability to ignore the impulse. While created pre-COVID, the song connects deeply with Welch’s control of her anxiety during lockdown as she told Rolling Stone “I need the movement to move it out of myself. If I sit in the sadness, it doesn’t go away.” The fluttering and bombastic “Choreomania” then drops out into the soft and simple ballad of “Back In Town” as Florence sits with the dichotomy of love and pain she feels for her fame and music career. The respite from the fury and mania of the last three tracks is openly welcomed, even as Welch wades through her own struggles with her status and life. The musical curation of “Back In Town” mirrors the struggle of love and pain as Florence bounces the track between subtle and grandiose, at war both lyrically and sonically with her own image.
Oh, it's good to be alive
Crying into cereal at midnight
And if they ever let me out, I'm gonna really let it out
When I decided to wage holy war
It looked very much like staring at my bedroom floor
But, oh God, you're gonna get it
You'll be sorry that you messed with me
And I know I may not look like much
Just another screaming speck of dust
But, oh God, you're gonna get it
You'll be sorry that you messed with us
Girls Against God
Unlike “Choreomania,” “Girls Against God” is a pandemic song actively created during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. This track finds Florence grappling with being stuck at home and not being able to do what makes her feel alive, simmering in her own misery. Lyrically, she is cognizant of her just being one person that is frustrated about her normal life being illegal for public health concerns, and she turns her rage towards higher powers that inflicted this pain upon her. This fury is softer and less grandiose of a track, seemingly holding onto the vein of her being just one person fighting this battle as opposed to a massive band and orchestra of support she would normally have on stage. In his Instagram love letter to Dance Fever, producer Jack Antonoff expressed his favor for “Girls Against God,” stating “made remotely in the heat of lockdown. that song just brings me back to some of the best moments during a dark time. dance fever forever”. Maggie Rogers also lent vocals onto both “Girls Against God” and the following “Dream Girl Evil,” which finds Welch expressing her own anger at society’s expectations of women and girls. Florence finds acute freedom in women who do not conform to the standards set upon them, and personally refers to being called an angel, that people like her better in their head, and discusses her inability to adhere to the weight of the expectations of a patriarchal society. Her croon holds a chanting mentality to it as she smashes through the idea of being someone’s “dream girl,” and the plight is incredibly visceral.
Everything I thought I knew has fallen out of view
In this blindness that I'm condemned to
Well, can you hear me?
I cannot hear you
Every song I thought I knew, I've been deafened to
And there's no one left to sing to
Cassandra
Clocking in at just a minute and thirteen seconds, “Prayer Factory” leads into the back half of Dance Fever with a poetic chant. The interlude offers a reprieve from the frantic energy of the previous two tracks and holds Welch’s grief in a hymn. Florence sounds nearly like she is yelling out in an empty cathedral, demanding that the God she has already yelled at listen to her more. “Cassandra” follows with heavy reference to the Greek story of Cassandra, who was blessed with the ability to see the future but cursed with this knowledge due to no one believing her, most notably with the downfall of Troy. Florence takes this mythology and internalizes it, speaking now as if she was Cassandra and no longer could see the future through the loss of her future with the pandemic. This track finds Florence continuing her rage at the Gods, blaming them for her misery and the downfall of life that Cassandra’s story invokes. “Heaven Is Here” continues this storyline, offering yet another short interlude of Florence’s struggles with God. In this song, Welch seems to be taking the matters of God into her own hands, speaking as though she is God herself in the first verses. The track references back to the story of the greater album that began in “King” as Florence grapples with the two lives she could live, either the musician or the lover. Ending the track with “and every song I wrote became an escape rope/ tied around my neck to pull me up to heaven”, Florence alludes to her music being both a reprieve from the pain of the world but also a noose that is effectively restraining and killing her.
English sun, she has come
To kiss my face and tell me I'm that chosen one
A generation soaked in grief
We're drying out and hanging on by the skin of our teeth
I never thought it would get this far
This somewhat drunken joke
Sometimes, I see so much beauty
I don't think that I can cope
Daffodil
“Daffodil” begins with a startling deep inhale as Florence wakes up from the madness of the previous trilogy of songs to enter a new feeling for the rest of the album. With a newfound sense of awareness, Welch has recovered from her lack of sight in “Cassandra” and decides to look for the moments of happiness in daily life. This song also has inlaid the Greek myth of Narcissus, which is the proper name for the daffodil flower. In Narcissus's story, he falls in love with his own reflection in the water and dies staring at himself, with the flower that became known as Narcissus growing out of where he laid. Florence described this track best in her Instagram post announcing the single where she called it “a clamour of joy, fury and grief”.
Florence’s struggles of being unable to perform, unable to see friends and family, and unable to write music left her wondering where she could put any emotion or energy, which resulted in the birth of track eleven titled “My Love.” This track finds Welch losing herself in the agony while laying on a bed of fluorescent technopop, however the distinct dance-floor-readiness of the track feels slightly disjointed from the rest of the album that has already occurred in a grand gospel of emotion. Continuing onward, “Restraint” is the shortest track on the album at just forty-eight seconds. Speaking in a ghastly voice, Welch asks if she has learned enough self-control for someone, but the person she is speaking to is ambiguous for the listener. It could be the God she has rained fury upon for much of the album, the listener for their perception of her, or even herself. It is an uncomfortable continuation of “My Love,” dropping out the dance floor straight into a grave of pain, however Florence lives in the theatrics to get her point across.
I've blown apart my life for you
And bodies hit the floor for you
And break me, shake me, devastatе me
Come herе, baby, tell me that I'm wrong
I don't love you, I just love the bomb
Buildings falling is the only thing that turns me on
The Bomb
“The Bomb” continues to explore Welch’s relationship with both love and her performing career. She bounces between the two lyrically, unable to fully settle on which portion of her life she is settled on exploding with the bomb of self-sabotage. With soft caresses of backing vocals and a building symphony of a band behind her, Welch comes to terms with her self-destructive tendencies but is unable to decide what direction is correct for her moving forward, keeping her on a loop of tearing herself down and then rebuilding. “Morning Elvis” follows to close out the experience of Dance Fever and returns the album into its angelic rise and fall creation of sound. Florence has spoken openly and repeatedly about her desire to stop touring and quit making music, and she told The New York Times, “The whole record is a ‘be careful what you wish for’ fable. The monster of the performance heard me: You don’t want to tour anymore? Sit still for a year. How do you feel now?” Coupling this with her recent journey to sobriety, “Morning Elvis” finds Welch surviving all of these trials and tribulations to finally make it back on stage again. The track is deeply reverent of the road she has come down and a love letter to the religion she finds within the stage, ending in cheers from a crowd solidifying the successful end to many of the trials and tribulations found throughout Dance Fever.
If I make it to the mornin'
I shoulda come with a warnin'
Oh, you know I'm still afraid
I'm still crazy and I'm still scared
To be spared
Morning Elvis
With an album so complexly destroying and rediscovering Florence’s desires, it can be hard to encapsulate the true weight of the album messaging any better than Florence herself, who told g1, "I'm almost playing a joke on this creation, between mythology and reality. What did I create to protect myself and who am I underneath it? A lot of what I do on disco is embody that mythology in the chorus and destroy it in the verse. I walk between reality and fantasy."
The sickness of Dance Fever is imperfect, but so is Florence herself as she offers her soul for all to read. Florence’s lyrics and messaging are beautiful, but the issues of Dance Fever occur in the lack of cohesion between the entire album as a whole. Given the pandemic, production was begun by Jack Antonoff and ended by Glass Animals frontman Dave Bailey, which created some sonic dissonance on the albums flow, most notably with “My Love” being entirely too danceable pop for an album so rooted in grand hymns at the sky otherwise. Dance Fever is also admittedly a bit of a late addition to an already saturated field of albums referencing the struggles of not being able to perform, but the main stance it has taken on topics of grief, shame, and motherhood offer a new and more honest version of Florence + The Machine that is nothing short of powerful.
Overall, the ability to connect with the masses leaves an even greater legacy for Florence Welch to claim, even if she has spent the entire album unsure of if she wants it anymore. I will not say Dance Fever is not without flaw in its creation, but Florence Welch’s honest and cutting lyrics feel divinely placed and perfectly timed for a world that is constantly on fire. You may not love every track, but there is a track for everyone to explore on Dance Fever.