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Mar 10, 2022 By Mark Redfern Photography by Autumn de Wilde

Florence + The Machine (aka Florence Welch and backing band) has announced a new album, Dance Fever, and shared another song from it, “My Love,” via a video for the song. Dance Fever is due out May 13 via Republic. Autumn de Wilde directed the video for “My Love” (as she’s done other recent Florence videos). Watch it below, followed by the album’s cover art.

Jack Antonoff from Bleachers and Dave Bayley from Glass Animals produced the album. Work began in New York with Antonoff in early 2020 before the pandemic forced Welch to return to London, which is where she started working with Bayley.

A press release mentions dance music, ’70s Iggy Pop, Lucinda Williams, Emmylou Harris as influences on Dance Fever, adding that a “Nick Cave at the club” sound started to develop. Lyrical inspiration came 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.”

The album and its visuals were also influenced by Welch’s fascination with choreomania, which the press release explains is “a Renaissance phenomenon in which groups of people—sometimes thousands—danced wildly to the point of exhaustion, collapse and death. The imagery resonated with Florence, who had been touring nonstop for more than a decade, and in lockdown felt oddly prescient.”

The press release adds: “The image and concept of dance, and choreomania, remained central as Florence wove her own experiences of dance—a discipline she turned to in the early days of sobriety—with the folkloric elements of a moral panic from the Middle Ages. In recent times of torpor and confinement, dance offered propulsion, energy and a way of looking at music more choreographically.”

Last month, Welch shared the album’s “King,” also via an Autumn de Wilde-directed video. Earlier this week she shared another song from the album, “Heaven is Here,” again via a de Wilde-directed video.

Welch’s last album, High as Hope, came out in 2018 via Republic.

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