“Have I learned restraint? Am I quiet enough for you yet?” Florence Welch asks during an interlude near the end of her fifth album. She’s using a low, croaky voice straight out of the horror films she would project onto her studio wall while recording.
Restraint is not a word you’d associate with a woman who usually sings like she’s lashed to the mast of a storm-tossed ship. In fact the shouted cacophony of the standout song here, the magnificent Choreomania, would sit nicely beside last week’s new music from Arcade Fire – another band whose pomp and bluster can overwhelm but who offer a rarely matched thrill when they get it right. But Welch’s last album, High as Hope in 2018, was distinctly softer, and this time she was making music in necessarily more subdued circumstances too. Sessions in New York with the ubiquitous producer/co-writer Jack Antonoff (Taylor Swift, Lana Del Rey) had to be abandoned after a week and continued remotely in the spring of 2020. You can hear the pent-up frustration in the stirring ballad Girls Against God: “If they ever let me out, I’m gonna really let it out,” but the music never builds to its usual grand scale.
There are a few songs that seem designed to offer renewed joy when she finally returns to the stage. There’ll be two shows at the O2 in November. My Love, written with Dave Bayley of Glass Animals, is propelled by a thumping house beat and swells to a mighty chorus. There are so many voices on the gospel climax to Dream Girl Evil that it aleady sounds like an arena is singing along.
However, the overall feel here is one of hesitant uncertainty. She has writer’s block on My Love: “Now I find that when I look down, every page is empty/There is nothing to describe.” She’s there again on Cassandra, pacing “around the kitchen for scraps of inspiration.” The chorus of King sees her defining herself proudly against traditional feminine roles: “I am no mother, I am no bride, I am king.” But the muted music suggests different emotions, and the verses imply that she is wavering towards the pram in the hall whether she likes it or not: “What strangе claws are these scratching at my skin?/I nеver knew my killer would be coming from within.” She’s far from the banshee of old, but this latest development is always absorbing.
