Florence and the Machine: The Zane Lowe Interview

“I feel like I managed to take everything that I learned in the last 15 years and consolidate it into this record, into this art, into the videos,” says Florence Welch of her band’s fifth album Dance Fever. “I felt like, if I had to prove something to myself, somehow I kind of did it in this record.” In a wide-ranging interview with Zane Lowe ahead of Dance Fever’s release, Welch dives deep into the making of the record, including starting it alongside producer Jack Antonoff in New York in March 2020 (“I was like, ‘This guy's really good. He's really, really good,’” says Welch of working with Antonoff) and the immense subjects she tackles on it, including reckoning with her position as a female “king” of music, embracing humour in her songwriting, the power of dance to shake off the blues and her complicated feelings about her own artistry. “The longest relationship that I've ever had in my life, and the longest love story, is with the song itself,” says Welch. “Nothing has really been spared. And I think on this record, it was like, ‘Maybe this song creature is [a] more malevolent presence than angelic.’” Settle in for an intimate conversation between two musical figures who go way back, as they touch on Welch’s rise, the dissonance between her private self and her identity as an artist, the early-2000s indie scene in London in which they first met, and much more.