Song and video now available
Florence + the Machine have debuted “King,” alongside a video by acclaimed director Autumn de Wilde. The song is a meditation on womanhood, family, femininity and the subverting of expectations in which frontwoman Florence Welch declares, “I am no mother, I am no bride, I am king.”
“As an artist, I never actually thought about my gender that much,” Welch shares. “I just got on with it. I was as good as the men and I just went out there and matched them every time. But now, thinking about being a woman in my 30s and the future, I suddenly feel this tearing of my identity and my desires. That to be a performer, but also to want a family might not be as simple for me as it is for my male counterparts. I had modeled myself almost exclusively on male performers, and for the first time I felt a wall come down between me and my idols as I have to make decisions they did not.”
The song is available via Republic Records and is the first new music since 2021’s “Call Me Cruella” from the Disney film, Cruella. The band’s last album, High As Hope, dropped in June 2018.
