Grace Byron reviews Florence and the Machine’s sixth studio album, “Everybody Scream.”
Known for her red hair, bohemian dress, and pagan-inspired lyrics, Welch has brought gothic fanfare to pop music for nearly two decades. In her songs, she regularly communes with demons, ghosts, and devils.
She has described her live performances as an “agnostic church.” Her voice is her most powerful weapon, sonorous and ethereal as she dances around cavernous stages. For her previous album, “Dance Fever,” she drew inspiration from Pre-Raphaelite art, medieval choreomania, and the stories of Carmen Maria Machado, crafting a world of bittersweet enchantment. But if her last record was a fairy tale, she told KROQ, “This one’s just a horror film.” During the songwriting process, she steeped herself in the horror canon, studying occultism at the Warburg Institute and reading books such as Rob Young’s “Electric Eden,” which traces how British folk music in the sixties and seventies began to cross over with mysticism. “Doing the work and sleeping alone / downloading Revelations of Divine Love on my phone,” she sings wryly, on “Perfume and Milk.” There was an endearing camp to the rollout of “Everyone Scream,” which was released on Halloween: the teaser trailer, which was also directed by de Wilde, shows Welch yelling like a final girl into a deep hole. She even took screaming lessons to prepare. Welch has always brought musical-theatre instincts to her work, but these witchy references feel particularly well suited to an album that charts the sacrifices that she has made to have her work taken seriously. “Here I don’t have to be quiet / Here I don’t have to be kind, extraordinary, normal all at the same time,” Welch sings, of the power she finds while performing, on “Everybody Scream.” “But look at me run myself ragged, blood on the stage / But how can I leave you when you’re screaming my name?” On “One of the Greats,” which Welch wrote while touring “Dance Fever,” we find the artist recovering from the sort of electric performance described in the opening track. She imagines herself buried underground and then raised back to life to keep making music. It may be one of Welch’s best songs in years—the kind of glorious slow burn on which she made her name. She recorded it in a single, six-minute take, with Mark Bowen, of the band Idles; during production, Ethel Cain added backing vocals. She sings about being burnt out, at only thirty-six: I did my best, tried to impress my childhood dream made flesh and my dresses and my flowering sadness so like a woman to profit from her madnesses Her music has often reckoned with pursuing fame and artistry in the face of mediocre men who hold her back, but rarely has she been as confrontational as she is here: “It must be nice to be a man / and make boring music just because you can,” she coos. The music video is a single shot of Welch in the back of a car, singing along in a suit, sporting shades and a cigar, both mocking and inhabiting the position of male dominance. “You’ll bury me again, you’ll say it’s all pretend / That I could never be great being held up against such male tastes,” she sings. Welch is more than just a singer. Like many female musicians, the craft of her songwriting and the many instruments she plays are often left out of the conversation. “People often care a lot less about, like, how women make music,” she said in a recent interview. “The personal is always first. People don’t often ask the technical questions.” As with her past work, this album draws some of its force from the friction of romance, but the central conflict on “Everybody Scream” is between Welch and her own ambition. She’s often struggling to decide what she’s willing to give up in order to have a stable life. There is nowhere that she feels more alive than on the stage, but, six albums in, the costs begin to mount. On “Music by Men,” a soft, whispery folk song, she sings about going to couple’s therapy with a boyfriend. She picks at the man’s hair, at his “stupid band T-shirt,” and notices that, as they each listen separately to their own demos on the ride home, she slides down in her seat so as not to threaten him. She knows that, for men, ambition is rarely sexy in a woman. But the song also shows her fighting to find compromise, and to resist the urge to run away from his love. The balance between these two types of companionship—between her and her partner, and between her and the stage—is difficult to maintain. She pleads: Let it be us Let it be home Let it not be a spotlight standing alone running back to the only love I could ever control The horror at the heart of “Everybody Scream” is deeply autobiographical. In 2023, not long after the release of “Dance Fever,” Welch, who was pregnant, arrived at a concert in Cornwall feeling ill and bleeding heavily. She popped an ibuprofen and performed anyway, but when she got back to London, her doctor discovered that she had been carrying an ectopic pregnancy, and that her fallopian tube had burst, filling her abdomen with blood. She was rushed into emergency surgery. “The closest I came to making life was the closest I came to death,” she told the Guardian. Only ten days later, she was touring again. Welch’s songs have often channelled the tempest of her desires, and the intermingling of birth, life, sex, and death. She has written a great deal about her struggles with anorexia, alcoholism, and anxiety. But on her new album the spectre of the miscarriage forces her to reckon with her femininity—what it gives and what it takes—in a new way. Violence arises from a different kind of performance. “Sometimes my body feels so alien to me,” she sings on “Kraken,” a song in which she imagines herself as a literal monster of fame. In an interview with Radio X, she explained that, in the past, she had always felt like gender was something that was put on her. “I actually felt like performance and art liberated me from my gender,” she said. “Then, when I was just thinking about trying to have a family, it just kind of came to get me.” On “Sympathy Magic,” she conjures an image of herself crushed in a ballgown, as if she’s caught in a trap of her own womanhood. “I no longer try to be good / It didn’t keep me safe like you said / that it would,” she sings, before blaring synths carry her voice high above the void. The ghost of a child haunts the album, particularly on the penultimate track, “You Can Have It All.” “I used to think I knew what sadness was / I was wrong,” she sings. “A piece of flesh / A million pounds / Am I a woman now?” The song hums with restless potential until it explodes in a raucous chorus, guitars chugging and strings whining. There’s a clipped, breathless quality in her voice, a pervasive sense of anxiety, as if the near-death experience has unlocked something in her throat. Even the title track doesn’t surge with the same certainty as her old hits. These new songs don’t ripple with doubt but with fear and fury. The final song on the album, “And Love,” is a siren song, a lilting coda that trades in bombastic choruses for a softer palette, not unlike 2018’s “The End of Love.” A quiet piano rolls along with a harp and simple synths. Here, at last, Welch seems to find her own version of compromise. And love was not what I thought it was More like an animal crawling deep into a cave Than a romance-novel heroine getting swept away More like surrendering to something And more like resting than running It concludes in the present tense, with Welch repeating “Peace is coming” like an incantation. This is a calmer version of the artist than we’re used to hearing, outlining what love is through what it is not. Only a few songs earlier, she pleads, “Let me put out a record and not have it ruin my life.” This time, though, perhaps, there’s nothing to run from. “And Love” offers a vision of Welch’s future—a place where she can lie down and enjoy the fruits of her labor. It’s not an ending, it’s an interlude. ♦
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