We’re entering a school year where the miracle that is modern medicine has finally reduced COVID-19, for those fully vaxxed, to a horrid head cold (at its worst). Most things are settling back into “normal.” Concerts are back on, music festivals are in full swing, and vacation hotspots are back open; in sum, temperatures are high and spirits are free.
It’s no secret that summer is also music’s moment. It’s the time of new music, of the “songs of the summer,” of perfectly curated beach playlists, of blasting your favorites in your car, windows wide open, wind in your face. So, what’s coming up for 2022?
2020. I’m not kidding. Surprisingly enough, today’s highly-anticipated new tracks were written in the throes of 2020, when we were all miserably stuck at home. For artists across-the-board, isolation meant no studios, no live performances, and infinitely-delayed music releases. But, it didn’t turn their minds off. So, as artists do, they kept creating. And they made what is, in my humble opinion, some of the best work of their careers. Despite it all, artists found ways to transcend.
Florence + The Machine’s Dance Fever and Harry Styles’ Harry’s House are overwhelmingly and palpably joyful — this is not surprising if you are familiar with either artist, but it is a shocking result of COVID-19. Each album, in its own unique way, goes above and beyond the bounds of pop-rock music and joy, exploding into new realms previously untouched by either artist. P.S. They are both perfectly paired with sweating Arnold Palmers and golden California sunshine.
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Dance Fever follows the trajectory that any real fever would; the burn falls over you gradually, relentless and heavy. But, with time to heal you, you know you’ll breathe easily again. More than just a fever — it’s a post-apocalypse celebration album, a “The-Rapture”-just-happened-and-we-lived-through-it album, an album marking destruction and its aftermath. It’s an album to sit with when you’re unsure of the fate of the world or of yourself, prepped and ready to suffer or survive. In other words, it’s unmistakably a COVID album.
In snippets from her Instagram posts promoting Dance Fever, Florence Welch, the Florence of Florence + The Machine, shared the books she read and films she watched during isolation, penning her album. For something written in such a universally dark passage of time, the large majority of Dance Fever is best fit for an outdoor festival where concertgoers prance through grass fields and raise overflowing beer steins into the air as a sign of approval, rather than a world where you had to clean your bananas with Clorox wipes.
Songs like “Free” and “Dream Girl Evil” are perfect matches for this grassy fantasy. They spill outside of their three-minute timespans, leaving trails of glittery harmonies, unrestrained drums, and roiling guitars behind. Listening with my headphones in, I get the visceral feeling that these songs are positively too big for them — they bubble beyond my ears, wide, expansive, and weightless against the plastic of my AirPods.
Of course, Dance Fever isn’t just joy contained; songs like “Daffodil” and “Cassandra” beat down on you, dumping the black tar of loss and anger into your open, panting mouth. The finale of wails in Welch’s “King” tear through your sternum, tugging at the pain lodged there until it explodes out of you and you find yourself incapable of not screaming along.
Then, with “My Love,” you dance once more. You can spin in circles, arms in the air, face pressed against the sunlight streaming down on you. And it only gets freer from there. “Morning Elvis,” the album’s closing track, is replete with whispers, effervescent choral stacks, and bumbling basses. It’s a deep breath after the crash of the album’s earlier songs.
There is simplicity buried deep in Dance Fever, too. “Oh, it’s good to be alive / Crying into cereal at midnight / And if they ever let me out, I’m gonna really let it out,” says Florence in “Girls Against God.” In “King,” she laments, “We argue in the kitchen / About whether to have children / About the world ending and the scale of my ambition.” These are the quotidian things, having cereal at midnight and arguing in kitchens, that were fundamentally altered during the pandemic — sneaking bites of breakfast after dinner was no longer a fun midnight excursion, but another lonely place to cry, and you could only argue with the same person you had to work beside and share DoorDash orders with. In between existential questions about being a woman and a writer, Welch weaves lyrics that are in awe of and mournful for simple things.
Harry Styles’ Harry’s House also spends whole songs putting ordinary actions and objects on a pedestal. “Black and white film camera / Yellow sunglasses / Ashtray, swimming pool / Hot wax, jump off the roof,” he croons in “Keep Driving,” introducing us to this romantic laundry list song of average moments. In “Love Of My Life” Styles fonds over his lover and their ability to make the normal lovely — “Take a walk on Sunday through the afternoon / We can always find somethin’ for us to do” — and in “Grapejuice,” he reveres in the unadorned, casual days they spent together — “Yesterday, it finally came, a sunny afternoon / I was on my way to buy some flowers for you (ooh) / Thought that we could hide away in a corner of the heath / There’s never been someone who’s so perfect for me.” He even finds something lovely in eating at a sushi restaurant because, “You know I love you, babe.”
Styles’ third album is speckled with these adorations of the common. Even the title, Harry’s House, makes the home, something fundamental to human life, become a temple, a safe, vulnerable space to lose yourself at the altar of Styles’ gorgeously complex guitar lines and fuzzy falsettos.
In his pre-album release interview with Apple Music’s Zane Lowe, Styles shared that Harry’s House was finished more than eight and a half months before its release, which, in today’s fast-paced music industry, is an abnormally long turn-around period. This means the album was completed well before Styles stepped onto stage in September 2021 to tour his sophomore album Fine Line, shirtless save for a sparkly pink Gucci vest and his plethora of signature tattoos. During the pandemic, he confessed that, for the first time in almost twelve years, he had nothing to do. He drove his departed step-father’s old car around Italy, reconnected with family, and set up makeshift studios in friends’ homes for him and his songwriting team. In the album’s photo booklet, Styles shares images of himself with the same four or five people, masked-up in studios, and laid out on empty beaches. Surprisingly enough, creating, writing, recording, and producing under strict COVID-19 guidelines seemed up to par with many of our isolation activities.
In fact, Styles was even like us — the average — in his pandemic melancholy. The bubbliness of Harry’s House is broken up by three poignantly blue songs: “Little Freak,” “Matilda,” and “Boyfriends.” All three, when performed onstage or when spilling from a stereo, turn listeners quiet. The mood shifts, isinstantly somber. “Little Freak” is pensive and wistful for a lover who plagues Styles’ mind, “Matilda” is heartbreakingly relatable to anyone who has ever received less love than they deserve, and “Boyfriends” laments the flaws of loving a boyfriend and being a boyfriend. Each is paired with complex, bumbling guitars and Styles’ delicate vocals. They break your heart, but come prepped and ready with the soothing balm of lyrics like, “You don’t have to be sorry for leaving and growing up,” in “Matilda” and “I was thinkin’ about who you are / Your delicate point of view, I / Was thinkin’ about you” in “Little Freak.” Ennui is even hidden in the album’s most explosive single, “As It Was.” Styles shared with Zane Lowe that the first version of “As It Was” was a piano death march and that, at its release, he found it strange to watch people dance along to his worst moment. Well, Harry, when set against an upbeat, pop-y synth track and paired with a music video where you jump, skip, and twirl around in a glittery red jumpsuit, how could we listen to melancholy like, “Ringin’ the bell / And nobody’s comin’ to help / Your daddy lives by himself / He just wants to know that you’re well” and not dance along with you?
But more than a quarantine obsession with the ordinary and a deep dive into gloom, Harry’s House is chock full of effervescent happiness. Songs like “Daydreaming,” “Late Night Talking,” and “Daylight,” are unendingly cheerful. He’s in love, in “like,” in awe. Like Dance Fever’s joyful tracks, these songs are larger than my ears, than my car speakers, than a home stereo — they are so obviously best experienced live, with a crowd of peers surrounding you and Styles himself trilling in front of you. It’s an album to listen to while you’re lying on a beach towel, tanning, and chomping on fresh fruits. That’s how joyous it is.
So, how did these expressions of gaiety emerge from quarantine? There is no simple answer. Were Welch and Styles truly happy during their isolation? Or were they just optimistic?
What matters most is how well these albums fit both the serially-bingeing-Netflix, wiping-down-produce, group-FaceTime-ing-your-friends pandemic and our current Coachella-is-back, Disneyland-is-open, movies-are-in-theaters, masks-are-optional moment. That, my friends, is musical magic. We’re lucky to have stumbled upon two artists and two albums that are able to perfectly bring both together. That’s what makes them “pandemic” albums.