Lungs

With Lungs, released on 3 July 2009, Florence and the Machine arrived fully formed, baroque and breathless, as though Florence Welch had willed an entire world into existence through sheer force of feeling. After drifting through various creative detours – country curiosities, folk sketches, even a brief stint fronting the hip hop-leaning Ashok – it was her partnership with childhood friend Isabella Summers that crystallised the sound she had been edging towards. From those early sessions at Antenna Studios came the palette that defines Lungs: booming drums, harps tangled in distortion, melodies built as crescendos rather than structures.

Welch recruited Robert Ackroyd, Chris Hayden, Mark Saunders and Tom Monger to complete the lineup, and under the guidance of five producers – Paul Epworth, James Ford, Stephen Mackey, Eg White and Charlie Hugall – Lungs took shape as an eclectic patchwork. Punk blues, soul, art pop, indie rock and garage grit collide, but always orbit the same gravitational centre: Welch’s voice, enormous and unashamed, capable of turning emotional upheaval into ceremony.

The album charts a kind of emotional upheaval itself. Welch described it as a scrapbook of the past five years, filled with fear, guilt, love, violence and dreams, and those extremes can be heard from the explosive euphoria of Dog Days Are Over to the gothic shimmer of Rabbit Heart (Raise It Up). Even Kiss with a Fist, carried over from her Ashok days, feels reborn within this new, grander vision.

While the songs are steeped in heartbreak, the making of Lungs often seems to have been joyous. Much of it was rehearsed and improvised in Summers’ studio, where Welch refined the record’s tribal pulse and chased the “wave of sound” she had imagined long before Island Records signed her in 2008. Visually, the album is just as striking: Tom Beard’s photography and Tabitha Denholm’s art direction place Welch in an otherworldly tableau, wearing ornamental lungs crafted to resemble something Victorian and visceral.

Critics greeted Lungs as a bold debut, drawing comparisons to Kate Bush, Sinéad O’Connor and Fiona Apple, yet Welch’s voice – both literal and creative – felt singular. Reviews praised its musical ambition, emotional intensity and the way it pushed past indie pop’s usual restraint. Lungs soon found itself shortlisted for the Mercury Prize, then crowned British Album of the Year at the Brit Awards.

Commercially, the record became a phenomenon. It reached number one in the UK and Poland, climbed to number 14 on the US Billboard 200 and went on to sell more than 3 million copies worldwide. A run of singles, from Kiss with a Fist through Cosmic Love, helped cement Florence and the Machine as a defining voice of the late 2000s. Their cover of You’ve Got the Love became the band’s first top-10 UK hit, while the ecstatic rise of Dog Days Are Over turned them into festival fixtures and late-night-television naturals.

Lungs has since been expanded several times – Between Two Lungs, The B-Sides, and a lavish tenth-anniversary edition – but its power still lies in the original jolt. It is the sound of an artist discovering not just her voice, but the scale it deserves. Even now, it feels like a debut that refused to behave like one, reshaping indie pop into something visceral, cinematic and utterly its own.