THE CALM AFTER A STORM
On her fourth album, Florence Welch scales back her usual high drama and thrives on raw, inward vulnerability, writes
Looking back at Florence and The Machine’s discography and its evolving cover art, it’s fascinating to witness frontwoman Florence Welch’s growth from a histrionic belter to a mellow, soulful artist. A career that has spanned a decade, the transition has been nothing short of gradual, starting from her 2009 larger-than-life debut, Lungs and its sumptuous follow-up Ceremonials to 2015’s rock-leaning How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful and now her latest High As Hope.
On this album cover, Welch is wearing a skin-matching, queen pink dress with her arms crossed with a flower held in one hand. Looking directly at the camera, she wears an expression not dissimilar to the one on her previous record. However, there’s a soft, albeit ambivalent, openness about her that hints at a shift within herself. The shift translates into the lead single, a sublime hymn-like ballad Sky Full of Song.
“How deeply are you sleeping or are you still awake?/ A good friend told me you’ve been staying out so late,” she intones as a bassline quietly rumbles underneath. Despite the presence of a backup choir, the chorus feels restrained as if it were sung with an audible sigh: “Hold me down, I’m so tired now/ Aim your arrow at the sky/ Take me down, I’m too tired now/ Leave me where I lie.”
This sparse, stripped-down quiet storm aesthetic extends its reach all over the album — from opener June to South London Forever, Grace, and Big God, a stunning piano ballad supposedly about “that feeling when someone has not replied to your text”: “To my messages, you do not reply/ You know I still like you the most/ The best of the best and the worst of the worst… I still like you the most/ You’ll always be my favourite ghost.”
Beyond this, however, things switch into an upbeat territory. Set to a pop-rock groove, Hunger contains a startlingly personal opening verse (“At seventeen, I started to starve myself/ I thought that love was a kind of emptiness”). Stomping Patricia finds her paying tribute to her punk idol Patti Smith (“Oh Patricia, you’ve always been my North Star… From you the flowers grow/ And do you understand with every seed you sow/ You make this cold world beautiful?”) whereas No Choir talks about the realisation that happiness can be found in small things in life (“And there would be no grand choirs to sing/ No chorus could come in/ About two people sitting doing nothing”).
Compared to its predecessors, High As Hope is Florence and The Machine’s most musically restrained and lyrically open. The overall production is minimal, the hooks are contained, yet delivered with the same unyielding conviction that’s very much true to Welch’s brand. High As Hope suggests a new dawn for the band — a shift towards the light.