Upon revisiting Florence + The Machine’s debut album, Lungs, I was transported back in time. At the time of the album’s release, I was 16 years old, an age one might call prime for angst. With stories of make-believe already floating around in my head as I sat alone, dramatically fantasizing about love and loss in my childhood bedroom, listening to Lungs felt like I was receiving transmuted energy. I remember being astounded by this album, and being entranced by Welch’s siren-esque voice crooning harrowing, folkloric lyrics backed by ethereal harps and thunderous drums.
Riddled with grim imagery and allegory, Lungs is the first volume of cautionary tales in Florence + The Machine’s discography. Released in 2009, the album precedes 2011’s Ceremonials, an album that shifts focus from love and heartbreak to spirituality, as is the natural process. “I’ve always been attracted to dark imagery. I used to believe in vampires and werewolves. I get night terrors, panic attacks. Even as a kid, I’d be more inclined to write about a flower dying than blossoming,” Welch told The Independent UK in 2009.
Entering the forbidden forest of Lungs, we face many obstacles and endure self-inflicted injury: bloodied feet, black eyes, chipped teeth and broken hearts abound. Leading the voyage, Welch inventories the brutal penalties we pay for love with carefully contorted metaphor over striking percussion that is intertwined with violins, harps and xylophones. Initially, Florence’s machine consisted solely of a drum kit. This origin story is evident on this album, as Welch gracefully breathes life into each track with her powerful vocal range, with percussion serving as the very heartbeat of Lungs.
A natural nostalgia comes with the opening chords of “Dog Days Are Over.” A hallowed harp is carried gently by rhythmically clapping hands into the throbbing pulse of a bass drum, with each component felt deep in the chest. The album’s intro is threatening, but in a playful way, as if receiving a reassuring message from some omnipotent being of what’s to come: a light at the end of the tunnel. “Leave all your love and your longing behind / You can’t carry it with you if you want to survive,” Welch sings on the bridge. The track presents happiness on a silver platter with razor sharp edges, suggesting that true bliss often comes with the cost of surrenderance.
In an effort to bring some “joy” to Lungs, Welch wrote “Rabbit Heart (Raise It Up).” Although upbeat, to call this track “joyous” is subjective; “Rabbit Heart” is said to be written about Welch’s relationship with, and the consequences of, fame. With references to Alice In Wonderland and ritual sacrifice, the flurry of fame comes on quick and the call to action is imminent: “This is a gift, it comes with a price / Who is the lamb and who is the knife? / Midas is king and he holds me so tight / And turns me to gold in the sunlight.”
Welch sings of the blinding intoxications of love on the following three tracks: “I’m Not Calling You a Liar,” “Howl,” and “Kiss With a Fist.” On “Howl,” our ravenous hearts are released from their inhibiting cages, set free into the wild, on the hunt for the love of another: “My fingers claw your skin, try to tear my way in / You are the moon that breaks the night for which I have to howl.” This track is shrouded with gothic, graphic imagery that encapsulates the raging, lust-fueled fire that burns when one is completely immersed in the passions of love. The track cleverly conceptualizes the ways love can turn us into hungry and wanting versions of ourselves that we may not recognize.
Love is, at times, a double-edged sword, and is conveyed as such on Lungs. On “Between Two Lungs,” we see the softer side of it: “It was released / The breath that passed from you to me / That flew between us as we slept / That slipped from your mouth into mine.” The track refers to the powerful exchange of energy between two individuals in new love, and highlights the importance of treating such with delicate care: “I have this breath / And I hold it tight / And I keep it in my chest / With all my might / I pray to God this breath will last.”
“Cosmic Love” is a testament to the kind of serendipitous love that leaves as quickly as it comes. The kind of karmic love that, ultimately, is a mere whisper in the massive amphitheater of our lives, but has a lasting, rippling effect on our perspectives long after its ending. “Cosmic Love” is about a whirlwind romance, the kind that knocks the wind out of you: “A falling star fell from your heart / And landed in my eyes / I screamed aloud, as it tore through them / And now it’s left me blind.”
At the time of writing and recording Lungs, Welch was in an intimate relationship with a member from UK punk band, The Ludes. There’s a not-so-subtle integration of the genre throughout the album, and the influence of this relationship is apparent on tracks like “Girl With One Eye” (originally performed by The Ludes) and “My Boy Builds Coffins.” The latter track is one that might be considered to be imbued with vague metaphor, but the track is about exactly what it seems: death. The inspiration for the track was quite literal as well, Welch shared: “This was a song we wrote as a band – most of the others were written by me with one other person. It’s very literal. My boyfriend at the time, who was in The Ludes, was going to build a coffin for the cover of their EP, so he couldn’t take me to the cinema.”
“Blinding,” a personal favorite, is Welch’s phoenix song, as she rises from the ashes of that once-fiery passion felt earlier on “Howl.” A sobering wake-up call, “Blinding” closes the door to the darkest corners of the mind in which we often find ourselves after heartbreak: “No more dreaming of the dead as if death itself was undone / No more calling like a crow for a boy, for a body in the garden / No more dreaming like a girl so in love, so in love.” The track is a reclaiming of agency over one’s own life, breaking free from the grips of those aforementioned ghosts while piercing the veil: “All around, the world was waking, I never could go back / Because all the walls of dreaming, they were torn wide open / And finally it seemed that the spell was broken.”
Over ten years post-release, I reunited with this album, listening in its entirety as a now-grown woman, with actual experience in both love and loss under my belt. Lungs provided a different kind of burn this time around. Even with a more maturely developed appreciation for music, language, and the power they exhibit when incorporated together, I still couldn’t prepare for the enlightening experience I had with an album I’d almost forgotten about.
Written by Jessica K