Florence And The Machine announce new album High As Hope

Florence And The Machine will release a new album this summer called High As Hope.

The band’s frontwoman Florence Welch confirmed that the record, a follow-up to 2015’s How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful, will be released on June 29.

The lead single from the album Hunger has also been unveiled, a song described by Welch as being about a “lack of self-love” and dealing with a deeper heartbreak than just a romantic one.

Welch sings at the start of the song: “At 17, I started to starve myself, I thought that love was a kind of emptiness, and at least I understood then the hunger I felt, and I didn’t have to call it loneliness.”

The singer told BBC Radio 1 that she was trying to express a feeling that “sometimes you’re not good enough and you have to be perfect”.

She said that once she had made a record about a heartbreak, she realised “there’s a bigger heartbreak underneath”.

“When you realise it’s not always about the relationships, about the romance, you’re like, ‘oh, there’s a bigger heartbreak underneath.’

“And that’s perhaps that you didn’t love yourself, and the ways that you hurt yourself because of that lack of self-love.”

Welch and her band burst onto the music scene in 2009 with debut album Lungs, which topped the charts and spawned hits including Dog Days Are Over, Rabbit Heart (Raise It Up) and You’ve Got The Love.

Ceremonials followed in 2011, and How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful in 2015, both reaching number one.