Florence + The Machine share floor-filling single ‘My Love’ and announce new album details

Reminiscent of “Nick Cave at the club”, the track will appear on Florence Welch and co's fifth LP 'Dance Fever'

Florence + The Machine have shared a new single called ‘My Love’ – you can listen to it below.

The synth-heavy, energetic song will appear on the London band’s fifth studio album ‘Dance Fever’, which is due for release on May 13. You can pre-order/pre-save the record here.

Following on from recent track ‘Heaven Is Here’ and last month’s ‘King’, Florence Welch and co’s latest offering was first written as an acoustic “sad little poem” in the singer-songwriter’s kitchen before being transformed into a floor-filling anthem reminiscent of “Nick Cave at the club”.

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Speaking to Greg James on BBC Radio 1 this morning (March 10), Welch explained: “Sometimes the biggest dance songs, I think, have a really sad core to them.”

Lyrically, Welch was inspired by the tragic heroines of pre-Raphaelite art, the gothic fiction of Carmen Maria Machado and Julia Armfield, as well as the films The Wicker Man and The Witch To Midsommar.

‘My Love’ arrives with Great Gatsby-esque official visuals directed by Autumn de Wilde and choreographed by Ryan Heffington, who both worked on the group’s previous two videos.

Tune in here:

‘Dance Fever’ serves as the follow-up to Florence + The Machine’s 2018 record ‘High As Hope’. Yesterday (March 9), Florence described the new LP as being “a fairytale in 14 songs” while sharing its cover artwork.

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Produced by Welch along with Jack Antonoff and Glass Animals‘ Dave Bayley, the forthcoming album was largely recorded in London over the course of the COVID pandemic as Welch anticipated the return of clubs, live music and dancing at festivals.

Sessions were due to begin in New York in March 2020 before the global health crisis forced a retreat to the UK.

‘Dance Fever’ brings back the more “anthemic” side of Welch, containing shades of “dance, folk, ‘70s Iggy Pop, longing-for-the-road folk tracks a la Lucinda Williams or Emmylou Harris and more”.

The singer had become fascinated by choreomania, a Renaissance phenomenon in which groups of people – sometimes thousands – danced wildly to the point of exhaustion, collapse and death.

the cover artwork for Florence + The Machine's new album 'Dance Fever'
Florence + The Machine – ‘Dance Fever’ official cover artwork. CREDIT: Press

“The imagery resonated with Florence, who had been touring nonstop for more than a decade, and in lockdown felt oddly prescient,” a press release reads.

In turn, the artist began looking at music more “choreographically” and drew on “folkloric elements of a moral panic from the Middle Ages” as inspiration. Welch also pokes fun at her own self-created persona across the LP, while toying with the idea of identity.

At the time of ‘King’’s release, Welch opened up about how she’d started to consider herself as an artist in the context of her gender more after entering her thirties.

“I suddenly feel this tearing of my identity and my desires,” she wrote. “To be a performer but also to want a family might not be as simple for me as it is for my male counterparts.

“I had modelled myself almost exclusively on male performers, and for the first time I felt a wall come down between me and my idols as I have to make decisions they did not.”

Florence + The Machine are due to perform at a host of European festivals this summer, including Flow FestivalØya Festival and Mad Cool Festival. UK dates are yet to be announced.

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