Internationally acclaimed Florence + The Machine will return to New Zealand for the first time in four years with a show at Spark Arena next month.
The band's lead vocalist and primary songwriter, Florence Welch, spoke to RNZ's Charlotte Ryan from her home in London.
Florence + The Machine Photo: Autumn De Wilde
Reckoning with her own insignificance in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic forced Florence Welch to think in new ways about the "perpetual creative dissatisfaction" she feels each time she undertakes the recording of a new album.
"I feel like I can never quite get it right," she said.
"That is the pull of creativity ... every time you almost get it perfect, but not quite."
The path to releasing Florence + The Machine's Dance Fever album was particularly fraught, with the world shutting down as she was trying to finish it.
But it did put things into perspective, an idea addressed in the song Girls Against God, she said.
"It's kind of so silly to be sitting there shaking your fists at the sky, because your own insignificance is just so apparent."
Welch said her strengths lay in performing live, not in making records, but the last few years of lockdowns had her wondering at times whether in-person concerts would ever be possible again.
"Gigs, for me, have always been my church ... when I perform, I feel like it is something bigger and outside of myself that I can't really explain."
The pandemic disruptions made her consider the "spiritual connection" she had always found on stage and turned the album into an exploration of "the ecstasy and the agony of creativity", she said.
"I think I was trying to unpack my relationship with that power, with that creative spirit ... for this album, that had been about the relentless pursuit of creativity and never stopping dancing and never stopping moving, it was completely stopped in its tracks."
Recording it was ultimately a cathartic experience, she said.
"There's a defiance to it I think that is really uplifting."
The songs on the album were arranged roughly chronologically, meaning some of them were written pre-pandemic, despite sounding as if they had been written in response to it.
"Even Choreomania, which is a song written based on a Mediaeval plague, it was all written before," Welch said.
"The prescient nature of songwriting is always so weird to me."
By contrast, the later song My Love was written "with no conception that it would ever be even able to be played live".
"At that point I just wanted something that I could cry-dance to in my kitchen," she said.
Florence + The Machine's show in Auckland would be quite theatrical, Welch said, describing the return to live performances as an emotional and moving experience.
And the pandemic had left her love of performing live undimmed.
"I love live music because it's completely in the moment; anything can happen, anything can change," she said.
"As a perfectionistic person - someone who's struggled with that - it is such a liberation from that for me, because it can just be sheer chaos and that's beautiful."
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Florence + The Machine play Auckland on Tuesday 21 Mar 2023 at Spark Arena, Auckland, NZ
Tickets here
