Starting with a notebook of poems and ideas, Florence Welch had just arrived to New York in March 2020 to begin recording when Covid-19 forced a retreat to London. Holed up at home, the songs she had begun started to transform, ultimately arriving somewhere that Florence describes as “Nick Cave at the club.”

Dance Fever was recorded in London over the course of the pandemic in anticipation of the world’s reopening. It conjures up what Florence missed most in the midst of lockdown - clubs, dancing at festivals, being in the whirl of movement and togetherness - and the hope of reunions to come.

The image and concept of choreomania - a Renaissance phenomenon in which groups of people danced wildly to the point of exhaustion, collapse and death - became a focal point of inspiration. Forced off the road for the first time in more than a decade, dance offered Florence propulsion, energy and a way of looking at music more choreographically.

Written and produced through the haze of two lockdowns in London and NYC with producers Jack Antonoff (Bleachers) and Glass Animals’ Dave Bayley, Dance Fever is available as a standard CD, deluxe hardback book CD with five bonus tracks, vinyl, and digitally.

Florence Welch grew up in South London and spent her teens partying with art students and boys from bands, quietly longing to make music herself and believing that the best way to join those boys onstage was to first prove she could out-drink them all. So her response to the massive, world-wide success of her extraordinary debut album Lungs in 2009 and the equally huge follow-up Ceremonials in 2011 was fairly predictable: she worked hard, she toured hard, and she partied even harder.