Wednesday, January 15th, 2025

Florrie – Looking for Love

Ian Lefkowitz takes us back 12 years in Jukebox time

Florrie posing with a cookie jar mascot
[Video]
[5.50]

Ian Lefkowitz: Former Jukebox favorite Florrie released her debut album this year, which sounds lovely until you realize that the “former” dates back all the way to 2011. The last decade of her career has seen a lot of false starts and heartbreaks, and it’s easy to rue the missed potential, but her pop radar remains strong all these years later. Florrie’s newer songs layer her Xenomania roots with depth and wisdom, but “Looking for Love” comes from her initial set of incandescent bangers, dating back to 2012 or so. As has always been true with Florrie, her sense of rhythm and brightness let her songs gallop along the dance floor. Listening now, it almost feels like a portal to the world of Annie and Katy B and Little Boots, when dance pop hadn’t yet been fully subsumed by the Antonoff sound. And if Sophie Ellis-Bextor can do it, maybe Florrie can have a second act yet.
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Nortey Dowuona: In 2010, Florrie was preparing the debut album that would be scrapped after Sony dropped her, leaving her to make EPs until she finally completed her new album, The Lost Ones. “Looking For Love” was a song on her scrapped record that, due to being reworked, was added to The Lost Ones last minute. The hook is damn near identical to the original because it was taken directly from the original. Brian Higgins, her former boss and head of longtime pop songwriting team Xenomania, handles the keyboards and programming, but the drums — simple, well mannered pop-rock loops with little bright flourishers buried under the bass, keys and synths — are played by Florrie herself, to great effect. The only problem is Florrie’s voice, which is bright and clean but bland, carrying the tune as written but unable to enliven it.
[5]

Katherine St. Asaph: Thank goodness JADE made the definitive Xenomania song of the decade, because the actual Xenomania are sounding like Ali Tamposi if she gave up on life. The track is over a decade old, so what they were trying to sound like was probably “We Found Love” — if Calvin Harris had given up on life.
[2]

Isabel Cole: Every time this song begins it triggers the irrational subconscious conviction that it is an Ellie Goulding song I vaguely remember hearing on the radio years ago, but happily the illusion dissipates once the beat kicks in. The verses, low and wistful, are lovely, and the pre-chorus builds the energy appealingly; unfortunately the chorus doesn’t feel as massive as it ought to, even though I certainly can’t quibble with any details of production. The melody sounds like it’s aiming to soar but feels too leaden to fly. Its simplicity works against it, I think, and the easy warmth in Florrie’s voice that worked so well earlier can’t carry the song through those big, long notes.
[6]

Iain Mew: The melody makes it sound a bit like One Direction’s “One Thing,” with its lairy buoyancy replaced with electronic throb. That combination gives enough momentum to carry the song, but the gleaming sound dominates to the extent that the lyrics come off as weirdly static for their dramatic subject matter.
[6]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: The melody soars, the production passes for a Body Talk b-side, but everything feels a bit like electropop Lenny Kravitz. The intentions are good, and the popcraft appreciation is there, but the execution is strangely amateurish. A bridge that rhymes “heart” with “battle scars” with an invocation that it “never rains, it pours” is unforgivable.
[4]

Melody Esme: A very good pre-chorus that, like too many very good pre-choruses, has nowhere to go, leading to an insipid nothing of a refrain that’s unable to sustain the song. (Guess what words the title is followed by? Don’t think about it too hard, she didn’t.)
[4]

Jonathan Bradley: “I Took a Little Something” was so singular in its strange lost precision that Florrie’s truncated career became self-justifying: of course a lost gem like that would be a one-of-one. The worst thing about “Looking for Love” is that it sounds too much like it should be a follow-up to that earlier song, and like many sequels, it repeats the broadest strokes but loses the texture, the oddity. The point of “Something” wasn’t that it was a sad bop; it was that it was lost and druggy while containing the anxious possibility that its lostness might endure beyond its drugginess. It’s unfair to ask why this entirely capable, synth-rain frowny-face dance song isn’t as good as one recorded 14 years ago (the hook is about “looking for love in the wrong places”; it’s a frowny-face dance song par excellence), but I also can’t hear Florrie as anything but do-call-it-a-comeback. 
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Leah Isobel: Unfortunately, this nostalgia play worked on me.
[6]

Ian Mathers: The first time we covered Florrie here was over 13 years ago, and I gave “I Took a Little Something” a [10]. I still would, but I’d talk about it very differently now. (Both its jankiness and how much I love its jankiness have become more apparent to me, for one.) I’d like to thank Ian for picking this song over the 2024 version of “I Took a Little Something” on The Lost Ones, because now I don’t have to try to figure out whether I think it’s actually worse or whether I’m just reacting to the fact that it’s changed. “Looking for Love” is probably more representative of how I reacted to the album as a whole, anyway, and it’s good! It still feels like it has a bit more of a dance music pulse than a lot of otherwise similar pop, but in a more polished, put together form than 2011. Lots of people trying to make music get their plans and their dreams derailed; not many are able to stick with it (materially as much as emotionally) until they finally do. It’s hard not to be happy for her.
[8]

Reader average: [6] (1 vote)

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