Florence Welch Opens Up About Florence + the Machine's Euphoric New Album, Dance Fever

Nov 15, 2023

By Olivia Marks

Photography by Autumn de Wilde

In an age that favors—often demands—the constant reinvention of its pop stars, there is a reassuring familiarity to Florence Welch, front woman of Florence + the Machine. Here she is, a Saturday lunchtime in February, nearly 15 years after she crash-landed onto the music scene, still looking as though she has walked out of a Renaissance painting: flowing Titian locks, untamed and tumbling around her sculpted, makeup-free porcelain features, a long, floral Vampire's Wife dress picking out the gray-blue of her eyes.

Which isn't to say there hasn't been an evolution, both artistically and personally. Perhaps it is owing to the raw emotion her work deals in, or her unabashed adoration of theatrics and drama, but I hadn't realized just how funny the now 35-year-old is. I didn't, for example, expect "Hoovering" to be her answer to how she occupied herself in lockdown (she became, she says, "obsessed" with a mini Dyson). "Florence and the Machine was Florence and the fucking Hoover," she says.

Her laugh—constant and infectious, and covering the spectrum from convulsing giggle to prolonged raucous cackle—ricochets off the walls of a private dining room at Luca, a much-lauded British-Italian restaurant in London's Clerkenwell, run by her brother-in-law, Daniel. He is here today, keeping us well fed with plates of Parmesan fries, whipped salted cod, roast Orkney scallops and bowls of pasta—carbonara (for Florence) and ravioli (for me). In fact, it's a full family affair: Florence's younger sister, Grace, is in to see friends and comes to say hello with her new baby and energetic five-year-old daughter. Welch absolutely dotes on her niece. "She's like me when I used to drink," she deadpans, "fun, but she wants to destroy everything and maybe ruin your life."

This wry, gently self-mocking sense of humor runs through Dance Fever, out May 13, which sees Welch return to the euphoric, stadium-size anthems that defined her early career. After the success of the band's debut, Lungs, in 2009, each Florence + the Machine album (Dance Fever will be the fifth) has sold in the millions. They have played all the major festivals, been nominated for six Grammys, and Welch herself has performed with everyone from Drake to the Rolling Stones. "Lungs with more self-knowledge," is how she describes the new record. "I’m kind of winking at my own creation," she says. "A lot of it is questioning my commitment to loneliness; to my own sense as a tragic figure." Cue cackle.

DANCE MACABRE"Raw and modern...also rich with otherworldly fantasy," says Florence + the Machine's visual collaborator Autumn de Wilde, of the new album.

Take the opening line of the Kate Bush–esque "Choreomania" (named after the compulsive collective dancing mania that erupted across Europe in the late Middle Ages): "And I am freaking out in the middle of the street with the complete conviction of someone who has never / Had anything actually really bad happen to them." Or that of the lo-fi electronica number, "Free": "Sometimes I wonder if I should be medicated / If I would feel better, just lightly sedated."

"I feel like as a female artist you spend a lot of time screaming into the void for people to take you seriously, in a way that male artists just don't have to do," says Welch. She was "so tired of trying to prove myself to people who are never going to get it." So she stopped. And "it set me free."

The photographer and director Autumn de Wilde, responsible for the album's artwork and Welch's new music videos, was instrumental in creating Florence's new liberated world. "She is an electric genius," de Wilde says of Welch. "I started to feel like the record she was making was very honest, very raw and modern, but also rich with otherworldly fantasy. I wanted to create a visual escape hatch into an ancient fairy tale." Rodarte provided the clothes, including a hooded satin purple cloak in the video for the album's opening track, "King." "Florence's dedication to theatrical performance and Autumn's singular vision allowed for the most cinematic of costumes," say Kate and Laura Mulleavy.

The pandemic was looming when Welch started working with producer Jack Antonoff in New York, only a few months after finishing a grueling tour for her 2018 album, High As Hope. "It's almost like an addictive cycle," she says of her need to constantly record. "You forget the pain so quickly." Plus, she was 33 (her "resurrection year," as she puts it) and felt she was "finally growing into myself as a performer" while also increasingly aware of that all-too-familiar "rumbling panic that your time to have a family might suddenly just—" she clicks her fingers like a magician. "I had this drive underneath me, and I was like, If these songs want to get out, I have to get them out fast, because I do have other desires…."

It is the push and pull of these "other desires"—namely motherhood and the impact childbearing can have on a career, a body, a mind—that the track "King" explores so affectingly. You can already hear its refrain, "I am no bride, I am no mother, I am king," being bellowed by thousands of women on this summer's festival circuit. "The whole crux of the song is that you’re torn between the two," she says. "The thing I’ve always been sure of is my work, but I do start to feel this shifting of priorities, this sense of, like," she drops to a whisper—"maybe I want something different."

I wonder what it is that makes her feel like she can't have both—motherhood and a career. She pauses. "I think I’m afraid. It seems like the bravest thing in the world to have children. It's the ultimate measure of faith and of letting go of control. I feel like to have a child and to let that amount of love in.… I’ve spent my life trying to run away from these big feelings. I think I’ve had a stilted emotional immaturity just through having been in addiction and eating disorders for years." She admits she has a "really complicated relationship" with her body. Finally she is comfortable in it, but the idea of the change it would undergo is one she finds terrifying.

Welch has been sober for eight years, but lockdown was hard. "When you’re sober, it is unfiltered reality all day, every day. You don't get a brain break. I really fucking empathize with anyone who did relapse in those two years because I think it was probably the closest I’ve ever thought about it." She says it is "a miracle" that she didn't fall back into her old patterns with food.

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"There were moments when I was like, Should I be starting to cut back on my sugar? Or should I do a cleanse? And that for me is just a slippery slope. Anorexia provides a feeling of certainty, because you’re just like, I’m going to control this. Luckily, I have people I can talk to, and that's one of the most important things for anyone—to keep talking about it. And not to be ashamed if those thoughts come up."

"I feel like as a female artist you spend a lot of time screaming into the void for people to take you seriously," says Welch. So she stopped. And "it set me free"

She spent the time at home in South London with her partner, a relationship she is reluctant to talk about—the only time in our interview she momentarily clams up. Recently, she explains, she came across a magazine at her sister Grace's house "from, like, five years ago, and it was just a photo montage of everyone I’d ever been out with." It dredged up "a lot of bad experiences [with the media] when I was young," though, she laughs ruefully, "when you get into your 30s, they care so much less about who you’re dating." What she will say is that she now realizes "you don't have to date bad people to make good songs." Indeed, she no longer has "the energy to be in a huge amount of emotional distress and make work."

Which is partly why for six months after flying back to the U.K. ("Free" was, "ironically," the last track she and Antonoff created before the pandemic forced her home), she wrote nothing. Without live shows, she felt lost. "Gigs have always been my sense of spirituality," she says. "In my daily life I am just racked with racing thoughts and anxiety." Hence the hoovering, and whiling away the days in cozy clothes ("I’m not in the house wielding a flaming sword," for anyone wondering) and, for the first time, she got into horror movies: The Shining, "all the Suspirias," everything by Jordan Peele.

When she finally got back into the studio in London, this time with Glass Animals’ Dave Bayley producing, Welch would project horror films onto the wall while they were working. The references found their way into the music, and the videos too. In "King," a nightmarish version of Welch snaps the neck of her lover and floats off with a group of ghostly women, who resemble, as de Wilde says, "dead cancan girls…roaming the earth together, broken and brave." All four of the album's videos were shot in Kyiv—a city de Wilde has long been in love with—just months before the tragic and destructive Russian invasion of Ukraine. "There was this sense that everyone was so happy to be working again after years of being stuck inside, like we had all just come up blinking into the sunlight," Welch recalls of the days spent filming with a local team of set designers, stunt people, and dancers, all of them unaware of the "darkness round the corner." "It is just so heartbreaking," Welch says. "Autumn and I have been reaching out to see if everyone involved is okay, but it is devastating to think about what could be lost. Of the artists now taking up arms. I was taken to a basement to see a whole room of Ukrainian embroidery—and the custodian who showed us was such a kind, gentle man. I think about him and that room every day."

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In the months ahead, Welch envisions her continued return to the world, to touring, to becoming "a larger-than-life person again." And yet, the past two years have shown her another life is possible. She describes sitting in her kitchen, "looking over at two of my old friends. And I was just like, I’m so lucky to get to have people that I love in my life. Maybe not everything is about work and achievement. There might be other ways to feel fulfilled and grounded."

And with that, her niece bursts through the door, followed by the rest of the family. Something tells me, as Florence takes her nephew in her arms, our time is up. Two days later, I receive an email. "There was a song that didn't quite make it to the album," she writes, "that contained the line ‘the creep of domesticity it both horrifies and calls to me.’ Even with all my logic that my life is in so many ways probably not suited for children, it is creeping up on me despite myself. Haunting me almost." For now though, she is still Florence, still king.

Fashion Editor: Amanda Harlech. Hair, Odile Gilbert; Makeup, Sarah Reygate. Produced by Allegra Amati and Fraser Stannage at Image Partnership; Set Design, Stella Fox; Lighting Designer, Dustin Stefansic. Creative Direction and Photography by Autumn de Wilde. Courtesy of Polydor Records U.K.