Florence Welch has built her career on the premise that she feels things more painfully and powerfully than anybody else. Accordingly, her band's third studio album How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful is one long Ophelia mad scene, a breakup record from the point of view of someone who is absolutely convinced that her breakup is the most devastating thing that has ever happened to anyone.

She makes a pretty good case for that, to be fair. "What was it that I said?/ I can't help but pull the earth around me to make my bed," she cries in "Ship to Wreck", which goes from sleeping pills to great white sharks in its first two lines. Welch has quoted producer Markus Dravs as telling her that she's "not allowed to write any more songs about water," although she appears to have dodged that dictum at every opportunity.

These aren't just songs about heartbreak; they're songs about total and utter eclipses of the heart. "Delilah", for instance, concerns the epic psychic carnage involved in waiting for a phone call from a boyfriend, and yes, that's Delilah as in Samson. (Several songs later, she's "thrashing on the line," this time as a fish.) Over the course of the album, she also invokes (or casts herself as) Persephone, Lot's wife, the Virgin Mary, Daphne, Jonah, and St. Jude—both the saint and the European storm, alluded to in both senses in two different songs. Over "Queen of Peace"'s stomps and choir and horns, she imagines herself "dissolving like the setting sun/ Like a boat into oblivion/' CAUSE YOU'RE DRIVING ME AWAAAAAAY!" (See? Aquatic lyrics again.)

It takes an alarming seriousness of purpose to pull this stuff off—the campy playfulness of Florence and the Machine's 2009 debut single "Kiss With a Fist" wouldn't do. The obvious presence lurking near Welch's current songwriting is Adele, whose "Rolling in the Deep" she has to wish she'd thought of first, but the other source of inspiration floating nearby is PJ Harvey, specifically the PJ Harvey of To Bring You My Love. (As with Harvey, there's a lot of gender-flipping in Welch's lyrics: "Mother" would be very obviously a gospel song if it were called "Father".) Welch's voice trembles and groans until she hauls herself up to the parts of her songs that she can belt out with desperate, bleating vibrato. And the arrangements on How Big are this big: lush and ornate, tinkering with their details every few seconds, cresting and crashing and cresting and cresting some more. The title track's orchestral coda is worthy of Trevor Horn's wildest fantasies.

What really binds How Big together, though, is Welch's exceptional sense for melody. No matter how tormented these songs get, they let her show off with grand, arching vocal lines, leaping deftly across her registers. (There are going to be a lot of disappointed karaoke singers signing up for "What Kind of Man" or "Delilah", then discovering that their range is nowhere near Welch's.) This is a huge, sturdy record, built for arenas—the band is among the headliners at this year's Bonnaroo, Roskilde, Lollapalooza and Governors Ball—and it's richly and carefully enough constructed to endure the extensive exposure Welch's heartache is going to get over the course of this summer.