2LP
Polydor – 3893647 (2022) EU
Florence + The Machine's fifth studio album, Dance Fever was written and produced through the haze of two lockdowns in London and NYC with producers Jack Antonoff and Dave Bayley (Glass Animals). It sees Florence at the peak of her powers, coming into a fully realized self-knowledge, poking sly fun at her own self-created persona, playing with ideas of identity, masculine and feminine, redemptive, celebratory, stepping into her place in the iconic pantheon. The LP nods to dance, folk, ‘70s Iggy Pop, longing-for-the-road folk tracks a la Lucinda Williams or Emmylou Harris and more, ultimately arriving somewhere that Florence describes as "Nick Cave at the club."
Lyrically, she took inspiration from the tragic heroines of pre-Raphaelite art, the gothic fiction of Carmen Maria Machado and Julia Armfield, the visceral wave of folk horror film from The Wicker Man and The Witch to Midsommar.