heaven is here

Where the previous track holds itself in controlled tension, this one tears open entirely. The percussion enters almost immediately with a physical force — this is Florence + the Machine at their most pagan, the drums not accompanying the song so much as summoning it. There's a genuine wildness in the construction, layers of sound accreting until the track feels like it might collapse under its own ecstatic weight. Welch's vocal here is the opposite of restrained: she's reaching for something at the top of her range, pushing into the kind of singing that suggests the body as instrument rather than vessel. The lyrical territory is spiritual without being religious in any doctrinal sense — more the pantheist's revelation, the feeling of encountering something sacred in the physical world, the earth itself as divine. Dance Fever as an album wrestled with the hunger for collective joy after years of its absence, and this track is that hunger given a body and set running. It works in the context of physical exhilaration — not background music but something you participate in. It belongs to the peak of a long hike when you crest something and see everything, or to a festival crowd at the moment a set catches fire.