Florence and the Machine Turn Pain Into Power on Everybody Scream

Florence Welch has never been one to tiptoe through the wreckage. Every Florence and the Machine album begins in the aftermath of some apocalyptic rupture—emotional, physical, or spiritual—with Welch standing at the eye of the storm, drenched, trembling, and still singing. Everybody Scream, the London band’s sixth record, opens on that same familiar ground: destruction as rebirth, collapse as prelude to catharsis. For over a decade, Welch has perfected a kind of grandiose spiritual pop that finds redemption in volume—cathedrals of sound built from harp, drum, and gale-force wail. Here, she doubles down, turning her pain into an orchestral purge.

It’s not just a metaphor this time. “There’s a feeling of dying a little bit, every time I make a record,” Welch told The Guardian earlier this year. “And, this time, I nearly died.” In 2023, while touring Dance Fever, she underwent emergency surgery following an ectopic pregnancy. That trauma reverberates through Everybody Scream like a fault line. The album thrums with the primal knowledge of mortality—of a body betrayed, and then reclaimed. “Sometimes my body seems so alien to me,” she confesses on “Kraken,” her voice trembling over a dark pulse before erupting into operatic rage. On “The Old Religion,” she fantasizes about shedding her own skin, craving the disembodiment of a soul that no longer hurts.

The sound matches the scale of those emotions: cinematic strings, thunderous drums, and Welch’s unmistakable voice cutting through the mix like a warning siren. Produced primarily by Idles’ Mark Bowen and The National’s Aaron Dessner, the album marries Welch’s pagan grandeur with something rougher, noisier, less contained. Bowen’s influence is unmistakable: a scrappier, distorted energy that makes even Welch’s most ethereal gestures feel grounded in flesh and blood. The title track, “Everybody Scream,” opens with cascading harp before detouring into a wall of drones, its lyrics celebrating the collective ecstasy of live performance. You can almost hear the sweat and feedback dripping from the venue rafters.

Somewhere on Welch’s creative whiteboard, she reportedly scrawled “Swans vs. Adele.” It sounds like a joke, but it might be the album’s true mission statement. “Drink Deep” channels the unholy grandeur of Michael Gira, its churning guitars and incantatory vocals drilling deep into the earth’s core. Yet, as with much of Welch’s work, there’s polish where there might be peril: her screams, precise and rehearsed, lack the danger the song seems to demand. Still, even when her execution wavers, her conviction remains seismic.

The mythic hero’s journey framework runs throughout the record, and Welch seems fully aware of it. “The Old Religion” begins as a soft soliloquy—voice and dusty piano—before building into an avalanche of voices echoing her mantra: you can’t outrun yourself. Elsewhere, “You Can Have It All” retraces that same path of fall and redemption but feels less revelatory, as if Welch herself is weary of repeating the same ritual.

Then comes “One of the Greats,” a late-album triumph that towers above everything before it. Stretching past six minutes, it swells slowly, methodically, until it bursts open in the final act—a storm of harp, guitar, and voice. Here, Welch tears through her doubts with a kind of holy rage: the fear that her intensity has become a brand, that her pain has been commodified, that mediocrity continues to thrive in a world where women must nearly die to be heard. “How do they keep getting away with making subpar records?” she spits, half in jest, half in exhaustion. It’s messy, unfiltered, and utterly alive.

That’s what makes Everybody Scream work—not its consistency, but its volatility. Welch is once again clawing her way out of the wreckage, transforming devastation into something divine. On “Sympathy Magic,” she howls, “Come on, I can take it,” daring the universe to throw another disaster her way. She’s been here before, and she knows she’ll be here again. Healing, for Welch, isn’t a gentle ascent—it’s combustion. The only way out is through the fire.