When this, the fourth, of Florence + The Machine's pre-album release singles emerged in March, it seemed a marked contrast, both visually and musically, to it's three predecessors. The video made to accompany 'Free' embraces the natural humour of this frenetic electro pop song, which concerns itself with the day to day realities of anxiety. It is marked by the interplay between Welch (As Herself) and Bill Nighy (As Her Anxiety), and is refreshingly lacking in grandiosity. I like a bit of grandiosity in a Florence + The Machine video as much as anyone, but with 'Free' it feels right to be messier, and to strike a relatively unglamorous, funny and matter of fact tone.
As with all of the videos made to accompany tracks from Dance Fever, the video to 'Free' was filmed in Kyiv last year. Before the Russian invasion, the Ukrainian capital was making something of a reputation for itself as a video making destination. It's not clear at this stage whether the rest of the videos for tracks on Dance Fever have been filmed or not. This is not a minor point because, given the shared locations and characters featured in the four videos so far, it seems likely that a longform film was intended to be the eventual destination. This was also the case with the videos released to accompany the How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful album, which were eventually linked, added to, and released as the film The Odyssey in 2016.
We'll just have to see what happens next.
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