Mermaids (song)

Mermaids
Single by Florence + The Machine
Released	April 21, 2023
Writer(s)	Florence Welch Dave Bayley
Producer(s)	Florence Welch Dave Bayley
Album
Singles chronology
Previous	Just a Girl
Current	Mermaids
Next	White Cliffs Of Dover
Dance Fever (Complete Edition) chronology
"The Bomb"
"Morning Elvis"
Lyric Video

"Mermaids" is a single by Florence and the Machine, released as the fourteenth track on the Complete Edition of their fifth studio album, Dance Fever.

It was written around 2019 and was a demo for Dance Fever that never got finished. Florence decided to finish the song after she broke her foot at the Dance Fever Tour on November 19, 2022, because she had always loved it.

Background

Florence had teased the release of the song on her socials since March of 2023, she put up a pre save link in her bio with a mermaid emoji around the time “The Little Mermaid” trailer came out making fans speculate if the link was for a song for the soundtrack.

She first teased the song with a video of her vocalising with a mermaid tail on laying in a bathtub on April 3, 2023, and on the 6th posted an edit with clips from different movies with the main theme of witches, sirens and blood. The instrumental and backing vocals played throughout.

The song was officially announced on April 10, 2023, with a video of Florence strutting while singing along to a part of the song, in the caption she announced that pre-saving the song would reveal the single artwork.

She teased the song in two more videos from April 13 to 19, and the song was released with a lyric video on April 21, 2023.

She posted a TikTok video three days after the songs release to explain the meaning behind the song:

"It was sort of about driving back from tour on a Friday night and watching everyone going out, these sort of glamorous creatures stalking the streets and remembering kind of when I used to be with them, when I used to go straight from stage to whatever bar or club I could find and kind of loose myself there in this sort of cheerful oblivion."

She went on to say that the song is a sort of love song to drunk English girls, of which she used to be one of.

Theme

The song dissolved into a mermaid fairy tale after Florence saw these "glittering girls" that seemed immune to the cold as they would go outside in the rain without any coats, and with their long hair she imagined them as mermaids that gets to come to shore once a year to drink and dance, but to do that they’d need to sacrifice a human heart.

Lyrics

I thought that I was hungry for love
Maybe I was just hungry for blood
Sea foam woman on the shore
Your prairie ghost, I'm a cottage whore
All the mermaids have sharp teeth
Razor blades all in your feet

England is only ever grey or green
The girls glitter striding glorious and coatless in the rain
I remember falling through these streets
Somewhat out of place, if not for the drunkenness

It makes my chest hurt to think of it
Not of regret, but of missing that

Cheerful oblivion
Cheerful oblivion

It was not all pain and pavements slick with rain
And shining under lights from shitty clubs and doing shitty drugs
And hugging girls that smelt like Britney Spears and coconuts

And with your mermaid hair and your teeth so sharp
You crawled from the sea to break that sailor's heart
You only get one night upon the shore
So dance like you've never danced before
And the dance floor is filling up with blood
But, oh, Lord, you've never been so in love

Cheerful oblivion
Cheerful oblivion
Cheerful oblivion

And the mermaids, they come once a year
They climb the struts of Brighton Pier
They come to drink, they come to dance
To sacrifice a human heart
And the world is so much wilder than you think
You haven't seen nothing till you seen an English girl drink

Cheerful oblivion
Cheerful oblivion
Cheerful oblivion
Cheerful oblivion
Cheerful oblivion