To top off latest astounding album ‘Dance Fever’, Florence + The Machine have kept an absolute ace up their incredibly billowing sleeves with ‘Mermaids’. What starts as a measured, ponderous chant, peppered with drum strikes that sound like an enormous door being earnestly rapped becomes a whole different beast once the portal is flung open to the sound of grand horn blasts and the London songstress performs an act that only she can: turning a vision of drunk and messy, shoeless, young English girls into glorious poetry.
Conjuring up her own memories of rainy nights out and using alcohol to quell the ache of the perpetual outsider, Florence Welch looks back on a potentially misspent youth “not of regret but of missing that cheerful oblivion”, repeating those final two words as an almighty, religious coda. Never has mid-noughties nightlife been better described than in the line “doing shitty drugs and hugging girls that smelt like Britney Spears and coconuts”, juxtaposed with magically mythical imagery of girls as mermaids crawling out of the sea at Brighton Pier “to break that sailor’s heart” over one of Welch’s most powerful anthems yet.
‘Mermaids’ is out to listen to now on all streaming services. It has also been included in a new and boosted version of Florence + The Machine’s latest LP ‘Dance Fever (Complete Edition)’ along with spoken word versions of tracks ‘King’, ‘My Love’ and ‘Cassandra’. We’ve included the ‘Mermaids’ lyric video for you below to have a listen: