Dog Days Are Over (Eat Pray Love)

The song arrives on a harp — which sounds incongruous for something that will shortly become enormous — and Florence Welch begins almost quietly, her voice held back before the percussion enters and everything starts to accelerate. "Dog Days Are Over" is structured as a controlled release of pressure: the first verse is intimate, then the rhythm builds, then the full band crashes in and Florence's voice opens up completely, soaring into registers that feel less sung than exhaled from the whole body. There is a specific physical sensation this song produces — a tightening in the chest before release, something like the moment you decide to run. The lyric is about leaving something behind, about the difficulty of happiness when you've grown accustomed to its absence. The production layers hand claps, percussion, and strings into a kind of euphoric noise that doesn't feel polished so much as overwhelming. Welch's voice is operatic in range but earthy in texture, and she delivers the chorus with the conviction of someone who has survived something and is only now starting to believe it. This is the song for a morning run in the first warm week of spring, or for a road trip toward something new.