The Sisters of Mercy / Floodland (Deluxe Version) / 1985
Flood II
hypnotic, ominous, submissive dread
"Flood II" is a hallucinatory closing piece built from repetition and a single dominant image: a hallway dissolving into water. It functions less as a narrative song than as an incantation, pairing a seductive, reassuring female voice with a sense of dread the narrator cannot escape.
dissolution of self seduction and danger apocalyptic imagery loss of control ritual/incantation
Who's speaking
A first-person narrator addressed by an unnamed female figure who repeatedly offers reassurance; the narrator seems increasingly disoriented and unreliable, caught between surrender and panic.
What happens
The song opens with a static image of a hallway behaving like the sea, then introduces a woman's voice soothing the narrator and inviting him to let the flood come. A refrain marks a shift from past to present tense as the water arrives. The narrator is pulled into a disoriented interlude — voices calling his name, a strange scene in a bar — before the central refrain and the woman's invitation return, ending on the single word that names the catastrophe.
How it's built
The song is built almost entirely on refrain and variation rather than conventional verse-chorus development: the hallway image, the woman's spoken-style lines, and the "way it was / way it is" couplet all recur with slight shifts, creating a looping, trance-like structure that mimics rising water rather than telling a story in sequence.
Section by section
Opening image
The song begins by fixing attention on a single, strange image—an interior space moving like open water—before any human voice enters, establishing disorientation as the baseline rather than a dramatic turn.
The woman's reassurance
“no harm will come your way”
Her lines function as both comfort and command, urging surrender to the coming flood. The reassurance is suspicious precisely because it insists so hard; it reads as seduction toward self-destruction dressed as safety.
Central refrain
The shift from describing how things used to be to stating how they are now marks the moment the flood stops being metaphorical threat and becomes present reality, the hinge of the song's loose structure.
Disoriented interlude
“strange men rent strange flowers”
The narrator's attention fractures into disconnected sensory fragments—voices, a bar, an unexplained transaction—suggesting intoxication, panic, or dissociation as the flood closes in, with the stuttered trailing off reinforcing a loss of composure.
Closing refrains
The song ends by cycling back through its own refrains rather than resolving, ending on the bare noun that has hovered over the whole piece, letting repetition itself stand in for the engulfment being described.
Craft
- extended metaphor
- The hallway behaving like the ocean is sustained and returned to throughout, turning a domestic space into something submerging and uncontrollable.
- anaphora
- Repeated openings on "she says" and the past/present couplet give the song its ritualistic, liturgical quality, as if the words are being chanted rather than narrated.
- direct address via reported speech
- The woman's dialogue is quoted rather than described, making her voice feel immediate and inescapable, almost like an incantation spoken over the narrator.
- tense shift
- Moving from past to present tense in the recurring couplet dramatizes the flood's arrival as something happening now, collapsing memory into immediate experience.
Reading it
The most persuasive reading treats the flood as a metaphor for being overwhelmed—by desire, by a relationship, by death, or by submission to forces beyond the narrator's control—with the woman's voice functioning as a kind of siren or psychopomp coaxing acceptance of that engulfment. A credible alternative reads the song more literally as an image of actual drowning or catastrophe, with the hallucinatory interlude depicting a mind fragmenting under genuine physical danger. The song's refusal to resolve either way is likely deliberate, keeping the metaphor and the literal image in unstable superposition.
Context
"Flood II" appears on the deluxe edition of Floodland (1985), an album widely understood to be shaped by themes of apocalypse, isolation, and emotional devastation following upheaval within the band. I don't have reliable specific biographical detail about this particular bonus track's recording circumstances, so I'm reading it primarily from the text itself rather than documented authorial intent.
Listen for
- the recurring hallway/ocean image and how its instrumentation likely mirrors rising water
- the contrast between the woman's calm, repeated phrasing and the narrator's fragmented, anxious lines
- the tense shift in the central couplet as a structural pivot point
- the trailing, unfinished phrasing near the bar scene, suggesting a breakdown in control
- the way the song ends without resolution, simply naming the flood
About The Sisters of Mercy
The Sisters of Mercy are an English rock band formed in Leeds in 1980. After achieving early underground fame, the band experienced a commercial breakthrough in the mid-1980s, sustaining their success until the early 1990s, when they halted the release of new records in protest against their record company, WEA.
1980 - present / United Kingdom
Full biography and catalogue