In May of this year, English nonet Florence + the Machine, led by frontwoman Florence Welch, released their best album to date, Dance Fever—a rich, diverse work of baroque pop headlined by addictive singles “King,” “My Love,” and the unrelenting “Free.” However, one of the album’s deeper cuts, “Heaven Is Here,” is already getting a second life with a brand new remix concocted by British post-punk quintet IDLES.
IDLES bring a haunting element of production to an already operatic song. The result is a balance of sorrow and strangeness emphasized by Welch’s powerful vocal performance and IDLES’s distorted tonal arrangements. The songs of Dance Fever are cathartic in their own unique ways, but IDLES’s translation of that catharsis brings more profundity to the swell and release of thematic and expositional tensions.
“IDLES are one of my favorite bands and I’ve been wanting to work on something together for a while,” Welch said. “It might be strange for people to think but I see a lot of symbiosis in what we do in terms of live performance. Connection above all else. Joyful rage and togetherness. A lot of people wished that ‘Heaven Is Here’ was longer. And I think IDLES have done the perfect job at turning it into a much-demanded dance track that loses nothing of the hex at its heart.”
Listen to IDLES’s remix of “Heaven Is Here” below.
