For Jorja Douglas, Stella Quaresma and Renee Downer, a dance floor does more than one job. It is somewhere to get away from things, somewhere you find out what you actually think, and now and again somewhere you sort yourself out. That is the premise of Therapy at the Club, the second FLO album, out on August 7 and running to 16 tracks.

The record works through the emotional weather of a night: heartbreak carried in the door, a warning issued to a friend's new boyfriend, the plain satisfaction of knowing you look good. It also covers the hours on either side, which the group insist are the important part.

Two years on from the debut

This follows Access All Areas, released in 2024, which brought them a first Grammy nomination in the progressive R&B album category, and it lands four years after Cardboard Box turned them into a group people had heard of. The early comparisons ran to Destiny's Child, SWV and Xscape, and they have been widening the frame ever since. The debut had glossy melodies and an introduction spoken by Cynthia Erivo.

The August timing is not accidental. Douglas is finished with winter albums, which she finds depressing. Downer wants volume, youth and a good time for everybody involved.

Where the title came from

They did not invent it. A song called Therapy at the Club reached them through a friend, written by Lauren Keen, who had worked with them on the previous record, and they liked it immediately. The phrase then attached itself to everything else, mostly because they kept going out and it kept making sense. Douglas hands Keen the credit.

The club as a subject

Quaresma's argument is that women already know a club is never only a club. Getting ready is the best part of it. A song everybody in the group knows comes on and carries you through something, and then the next one has all of you close to tears. Someone who broke your heart walks in. A stranger hands you information you needed. The title, she says, gave them a subject wide enough to write across without running out.

Downer is more equivocal about the actual going. She does not always enjoy herself, and puts the difference down to who she is with. The nights out with Douglas and Quaresma and her friends have tended to matter, and have often turned up something she then had to deal with in daylight.

Douglas finds it useful because the room appears to remove consequences. People say things there they would not say anywhere else, herself included, and she works out what is on her mind by hearing herself say it aloud. She learns about her partner in the same way, and about her friends.

Quaresma's version of that is funnier and a little bleaker. She has stood next to her boyfriend while he volunteered something she would have appreciated knowing six months earlier.

The morning after is its own genre

Douglas is clear that the feeling of invincibility is a loan, and the repayment arrives the next day. That is where a lot of the writing went. They did not want a record that only exists inside the room, so before, during and after all had to be on it, and she reckons the after takes up a decent share of the running order. Her name for the condition is post traumatic club disorder.

Don't Break Her Heart

The friendship song came out of a session with Julian Bunetta and Steph Jones, the pair behind Leak It. Downer says nothing in that room is predictable, and that Bunetta's rule is to drop anything that is not excellent rather than nurse it. They started with a chorus that arrived soulful and serious, left it overnight instead of forcing it, and came back and made it playful.

What stayed underneath is the seriousness, which Downer thinks is why people take to it. Friendship songs are hard to write without sounding like a greetings card, and Douglas says their earlier attempts failed on exactly that point, because nobody in the group talks that way. The fix was to sound like themselves, which is to say unserious.

Asked how far the protective instinct runs in real life, Douglas says they do not step in uninvited. If one of them gives the signal, it happens. If the signal is to stand down, they stand down.

Why the songs do not match

Quaresma says they went in with a sound in mind and let go of it once they started working with people who pulled them somewhere stranger. The rule became straightforward: if a song made them feel something and it was good, it stayed. Limiting themselves to one register seemed a waste given how much different music the three of them like.

Douglas adds that researching other albums put them off the idea entirely, because the ones where every track sounded alike were the ones they could not finish. What ties this record together, both say, is the singing and the writing rather than the production, and part of that comes from deliberately letting producers lead. Arriving with a fixed instruction rarely gets the best out of a room.

So there is an eighties pop streak, and there are horns on Remedied, a track they trace back to Christina Aguilera. Downer's summary is that the thread is feeling rather than sound, which is what the title was pointing at all along.

They want to play it

All of it, live, as soon as anyone will let them. Downer has been counting days. Douglas has already got as far as staging, and her requirement is a disco ball.