“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.
