Florence + the Machine’s new album Dance Fever is a winner

Florence + The Machine opened their account in 2008 with a violent altercation. The London band’s debut single “Kiss with a Fist” was a rambunctious number in which Florence Welch sings about a couple having a physical fight. Plates are smashed over heads, the bed is torched, limbs are broken. Both sides give as good as they get. The only winner is the song, a raw blues racket inspired by The White Stripes.

Fourteen years later, Welch and her bandmates are among the UK’s biggest acts. Their fifth album Dance Fever opens with another argument. This time, in a song called “King”, Welch’s singing has been expensively produced so as to sound simultaneously forcible and hushed. She sings about arguing in a kitchen about the difficult 30-something dilemma of when or if to have children. No plates are smashed over heads — although everything bar the kitchen sink is thrown at the tune, including lots of drumming, strings, harp, declamatory chords and a guitar solo.

This no-holds-barred performing mode has become typical of the band. Although Welch is often described as Pre-Raphaelite due to her flowing red hair and cut-glass English accent, her persona is far more broad-brush. Vocals are belted, while big festival stages are treated as tracks to be traversed at a sprint. “I’m always running from something,” she sings on new song “Free”, borne aloft by, of course, a galloping beat.

Band co-founder Isabella Summers, keyboardist and songwriting contributor, is missing in action, as she was from 2018’s High As Hope, although she has not formally left the group. The disruption to the working relationship at the heart of Florence + The Machine does not seem to have unbalanced the band. Instead, it confirms Welch’s supremacy: she has always overshadowed her bandmates.

The songs tell stories of downfall and redemption. There is much use of the first person. “We argue in the kitchen” are the album’s first words, but the person with whom Welch is arguing almost instantly disappears from the song’s narrative. Other characters exist as bit parts in the singer’s dramas. Her tone is not so much confessional as self-amplified, projecting herself to all corners.

“My Love” is a by-the-numbers dance anthem inspired by the unpromising topic of writer’s block. Other scenarios are chewier. “Girls Against God” evokes a pandemic-prompted sense of rage and loneliness. “Back in Town” is about a dysfunctional relationship in a Californian setting. Both songs have an affinity with Lana Del Rey’s west-coast singer-songwriter fantasies, an interesting change in register.

Del Rey’s collaborator Jack Antonoff is among Welch’s co-producers and writers on the album. Glass Animals’ Dave Bayley is another of her co-writers. The music has a baroque degree of instrumentation, but the different elements are deftly blended. Back-up and double-tracked vocals add atmospheric extra layers to Welch’s voice. Her singing is more varied than previous albums, with fewer fallbacks into the comfort zone of arena wassailing. Dance Fever is the work of a very different band from the tyros who made “Kiss with a Fist”, but it too proves a winner.

★★★★☆

‘Dance Fever’ is released by Polydor