Florence + the Machine
Everybody Scream
POLYDOR
Florence Welch came close to death in August of 2023 after suffering a devastating miscarriage, and after finishing her tour through sheer will and adrenaline, she wanted to be closer to nature. The mental and physical anguish of those days rush out of her pen on her latest Florence + the Machine album, Everybody Scream. Her sixth album was released on Halloween, which fits its themes of witchcraft, gothic romanticism, folk horror, and insanity that swirl around each track. Welch has described it as an album about “clarity” and “power” and as something of a mashup between Adele and Michael Gira. It also happened to be released during the perfect year for digging a hole and screaming into it.
The album follows 2022’s Dance Fever and sees Welch run herself ragged over 12 tracks. She wrote and produced the project with a small cadre of associates, including Mitski, Danny L. Harle, The National’s Aaron Dessner, IDLES’s Mark Bowen, and Glass Animals’ Dave Bayley. Whereas 2018’s High As Hope and 2015’s How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful were big swings across the pop plate, Everybody Scream gets more cerebral and probing and harkens back to her Ceremonials era circa 2011. Welch is clearly still a headline act, but scrappy enough not to care. When the first Florence + the Machine album came out, she was 22. She’s now 39 and more in touch with her body and emotions, as evidenced by recent interviews.
Everybody Scream starts with an incredible title track filled with church organ, a haunting backing choir, a killer beat, and an overall gothic vibe. Welch’s vocals on the chorus are breathless and begging for a reprieve from the madness and misery as she remembers dancing through a puddle of blood after breaking her foot onstage. Her vibrato sends shivers here as though she’s standing in front of a cauldron instead of a mic as she continues her fascination with the dancing plague that was initiated on Dance Fever.
Later on, the black-death bass track “Witch Dance” touches on communing with cats and dogs, while early single “Sympathy Magic” makes her cast of collaborators sound like a coven. Even lovely acoustic songs like “Perfume and Milk” hum with a raw energy, with this particular track seeing Welch sing about downloading the mystical medieval text Revelations of Divine Love on her phone. The earliest known surviving work written by a woman in the English language, the text documents the revelations author Julian of Norwich received following visions during a period of severe illness—an obvious connection to Welch’s own brush with mortality.
It’s not all gothic romance on Everybody Dance, though. Florence is also having fun on this album and even getting inspired by Buffy the Vampire Slayer on the pounding stadium-rock epic “One of the Greats.” Here, she wrestles with having sacrificed too much only to not be taken seriously within a male-dominated canon of contemporary songwriters. The song lifts off in a feminine fury of strings and layered voices by the end as Welch sings about letting the light in, finding happiness within herself, and a Buffy-like resurrection.
Welch recalled in a recent interview with The Guardian seeing a meme that summed up her music. It said, “Florence’s songs are either like, ‘and the mountains came down from the wind’ or ‘this guy hasn’t texted me back and I’m drunk.’” It’s online reductionism at its finest, but the post makes a valid point. “Buckle” falls into the drunk-texting category and is forgettable, but “The Old Religion,” “Drink Deep,” and “Kraken” light more mystical fires as Welch likens herself to a troubled hero crawling to heaven and imagines turning into a tentacled, one-eyed monster.
The last two songs on the album hit with a jackhammer force as Welch returns to her art-rock roots. “You Can Have It All” stretches her vibrato as she repeats the platitude professional women hear every day while mourning the loss of her child and what her life could’ve been, while “And Love” finds her exhausted but not defeated, picking up the pieces at the piano with a wispy flourish and repeating the invocation “peace is coming.” Love may feel more like “an animal crawling deep into a cave than a romance novel heroine being swept away,” but Welch is still here to catalog it all.
