Florence Welch had a title ready for the second Florence and the Machine album, and it was not Ceremonials. She wanted to call it Violence, and on October 28, 2011, the record finally arrived under a different name. That word never made it to the record sleeve, but it tells you a lot about the sound she was chasing after the runaway success of her debut.
Island Records and the Lungs follow-up
The English group released Ceremonials through Island Records on October 28, 2011. It was the follow-up to Lungs, the 2009 debut that had made Florence and the Machine one of the biggest new names in British pop. Nobody knew if the second record could match that momentum.
Welch did not shrink from the pressure. She went bigger. The album is a dense, dramatic work that critics described with a pile of labels: baroque pop, art pop, gothic pop, neo-soul. Reviews pointed again and again to Kate Bush as a reference point, and the comparison made sense: here was another English singer building cathedral-sized songs around an unmistakable voice.
Paul Epworth and the wall of sound
The production was in the hands of Paul Epworth, who had already worked on Lungs. For the deluxe edition, a wider team joined in, but the standard version was Epworth's alone. That consistency gave Ceremonials its wall of sound: harps, choirs, pounding drums and Welch's voice soaring over all of it.
The first signs came early. At a show in a Dublin theatre in 2010, the band played a new song called 'Strangeness and Charm' for the first time. A year later, in a Greek Theatre in Berkeley, California, another new track appeared: 'What the Water Gave Me'. Then, in October 2011, four more songs from the album were unveiled at an event in Brooklyn. Fans could hear the shape of the record long before it arrived.
Shake It Out and the chart run
The official lead single was 'Shake It Out', released on September 30, 2011. It became the song the band took to television, including a first appearance on The X Factor that November. The album itself opened at number one in the UK, making Ceremonials the group's second consecutive chart-topper at home. It repeated that feat in Australia, Ireland and New Zealand.
In the United States, the record reached number six on the Billboard 200, the first time Florence and the Machine had cracked the top ten there. Worldwide sales reached 2 million copies. The reviews were warm: an average score of 75 out of 100 on Metacritic, and Q magazine named Ceremonials the best album of 2011. The album's reach went beyond the charts. Its song 'Seven Devils' later appeared in trailers for Game of Thrones and Agatha All Along, as well as for the films Beautiful Creatures and 2 Guns. That kind of placement kept the record's dramatic sound in front of audiences long after its release.
The album kept producing singles into 2012. 'No Light, No Light' arrived in January, and later that year a remix of 'Spectrum (Say My Name)' by Calvin Harris gave the band their first number one on the UK Singles Chart. The song had been one of the four premiered in Brooklyn the previous autumn. The band toured behind the record for more than a year. The Ceremonials Tour began on October 13, 2011, even before the album was out, and ran until December 2012. Along the way, Florence and the Machine made their first appearance on Saturday Night Live that November, playing 'Shake It Out' and 'No Light, No Light'.
So why Ceremonials and not Violence? Welch borrowed the title from a 1970s art installation shot on Super 8 film. It was a strange, evocative name for a record about extremes, and it stuck. The word she nearly chose still hovers over the music, but the one she picked turned the album into an event.
Welch borrowed the title from a 1970s art installation shot on Super 8 film.