On Everybody Scream, Florence Welch Takes Center Stage

by Zahra Stevick, Bad Habits Editor

Illustration by Rishi Shah-Nelson

Florence Welch opens her newest album, Everybody Scream, by singing directly to her fans. “Get on the stage,” she croons, in her distinctive contralto voice, “And I call her by her first name.” The title track, which also served as the album’s lead single, has everything one has come to expect from a Florence + The Machine song: synthy instrumentals, witchy lyrics, and, of course, some full-throated screaming. It’s a song intensely aware of its own existence, and one that can’t wait to be sung along to, the perfect lead-off to an album packed with self-referential music. On the next track, “One of the Greats”, Welch reckons with her place in the male-dominated music industry, and in “The Old Religion”, she even calls out the album’s place in her discography, singing, “And it’s your troubled hero, back for season six.” When considering Welch’s personal history, it isn’t surprising that Everybody Scream turned into such a self-reflexive record. Her last album, 2022’s Dance Fever, preceded a tour that made 35 million dollars but nearly cost Welch her life when she suffered an ectopic pregnancy after a show, a trauma that understandably influenced her relationship to fame and performance. Welch specifically references this event in Everybody Scream’s penultimate track, “You Can Have It All”. She starts the song out plaintively as she describes “a vision of my daughter,” then slowly builds to a crescendo until she is once again screaming, only this time, out of grief.

Or perhaps she’d been doing that since the beginning of the album. Welch is known for her songs about resilience and has been open with her struggles with anxiety and depression from the start of her career. “Shake It Out” and “Free”, two of her most popular tracks, are both about fighting one’s way through the darkest of nights, while “Dog Days Are Over”, one of the band’s best known songs, is about the unexpected, unbelievable joy of recovery. Everybody Scream has moments like this too; “Sympathy Magic”, which has been featured heavily in the promotion of the upcoming album tour, has Welch shouting “Come on, come on, I can take it…What else? What else?” Fittingly for a Halloween release with an occultish theme, many of the songs have incantation-like chants: “I will let the light in, I will let some love in, I will be happy, it will be perfect,” she recites on “One of the Greats”, and “Let there be love, let there be light, let me put out an album and have it not ruin my life” closes out “Music by Men”. Yet Everybody Scream knows all too well that death is tied inextricably into life, and some of its darkest moments are hand-in-hand with its most ecstatic choruses. After singing “All shall be well” as the refrain of “Perfume and Milk”, Welch’s voice becomes a low murmur, reminding us of “the rot and the ruin, the earth and the worms” as “the seasons change, the world turns.” And at the end of the exuberant title track, Welch begs her audience to tell her what “the magic and the misery, magic and the mystery” have done to her, ending the song on a guttural whisper instead of a scream. Loss echoes through the album, and Welch isn’t afraid to let it sit alongside—even spurred on by—the ritual of performance.

I’ve been listening to Florence + The Machine since I was fifteen, which means I’ve only gotten to experience one other album release as a fan. Dance Fever came out during my senior year of high school. Written mostly during the pandemic, the album is another record highly aware of its place in space and time. As I blasted the album in my car on the way to my graduation, fresh off a full year of online school, I felt like Florence truly understood me, like she’d somehow articulated my precise experience of isolation. Everybody Scream is nothing like that. It’s true that, sonically speaking, the album is far from a departure from her previous work. You could line it up with the end of Dance Fever, or even with 2011’s Ceremonials, and listen straight through, noticing only small changes in production. This is not necessarily a flaw, nor does it mean fans should know what to expect: in fact, a close listen of the album reveals that it is quite different from anything the band has released before. Plenty of the songs in Welch’s discography are personal, but they are also tracks that you can lose yourself in, relating to the sentiment but forgetting to whom the words belong. In “Hunger”, for instance, many resonated with Welch’s depiction of her struggles with an eating disorder, and in “Ship to Wreck”, it’s easy to project one’s own experience with self-sabotage. But on this album, Welch refuses to let you disappear into the music. “Look at my run myself ragged, blood on the stage,” she calls to the audience. “But how can I leave you when you’re screaming my name?” Rather than stepping into the role of the main character, we, the listeners, are constantly named and directed into the crowd, staring up at the performer. With Everybody Scream, Florence Welch makes it clear that after all this time, she’s done understanding her audience. It is time for us, instead, to finally understand her.