Florence + the Machine / High As Hope / 2018
Hunger
confessional and aching, with a defiant, almost euphoric undertow
An opening confession about adolescent anorexia expands into a wider meditation on addiction, performance, and the human need to fill an unnameable void. Florence Welch traces that same craving through disordered eating, drugs, stage performance, and compulsive phone-checking, arguing they're all the same wound wearing different clothes.
eating disorders and body control addiction and substitution performance versus intimacy shame and public judgment the search for connection
Who's speaking
A first-person narrator speaking retrospectively about her own youth, occasionally turning to address a second person (a lover, a fellow performer, or the audience) whose vitality she both admires and worries for. The voice is candid and self-implicating, not distanced or ironic.
What happens
The song begins with a direct autobiographical admission, then broadens outward: what began as a private, adolescent way of managing pain becomes a universal condition declared in the choruses. Successive verses substitute one form of hunger for another—starvation, drugs, the stage—each failing to satisfy, before landing on the smaller, contemporary compulsion of staring at a screen. The final verses return to a scene of public exposure and desire, ending on a fragile, temporary relief rather than resolution.
How it's built
Verse-chorus form built on a wordless vocal hook that bookends and threads through the track, giving it a churchlike, incantatory quality. The chorus is a flat, repeated declarative statement rather than a melodic hook with development, functioning almost like a group confession or mantra. The bridge-like middle section catalogs different objects of hunger in parallel clauses before narrowing to an intimate, quieter image, and the closing verses recycle earlier material with one crucial added line that supplies the song's only moment of resolution.
Craft
- extended metaphor
- Hunger stands in for any unmet emotional need, letting the song move fluidly between literal starvation, substance use, sexual performance, and digital compulsion without needing to explain the connections.
- anaphora
- The repeated communal declaration in the chorus turns private shame into shared condition, shifting the song from confession to collective statement.
- religious imagery
- References to persecution and self-sacrifice frame personal exposure and judgment in near-martyrdom terms, elevating ordinary social shame into something almost sacred.
- juxtaposition
- Grand, dramatic images of youth and beauty are placed against a mundane detail of scrolling a phone, suggesting the same ancient craving now plays out in trivial, isolating ways.
Reading it
placeholder
Context
placeholder
Listen for
- placeholder
About Florence + the Machine
Florence and the Machine are an English indie rock band formed in London in 2007 by lead vocalist Florence Welch, keyboardist Isabella Summers, guitarist Rob Ackroyd, drummer Christopher Lloyd Hayden and harpist Tom Monger. The band's music features dramatic, eccentric productions and Welch's powerful vocals.
2007 - present / England
Full biography and catalogue