Florence Welch knows the power of the voice all too well. She possesses a singular belt that adds an aching dimension to her rousing, elliptical pop; she headlines festivals and arenas for crowds that shout along with her lyrics in adulation. “I can come here and scream as loud as I want,” she wails on the jaggedly anthemic opening title track of her mononymic project Florence + the Machine’s Everybody Scream; she’s specifically referring to the transformative nature of live performance in that lyric, but her sixth album goes on to explore the physical and emotional changes one can experience when letting your voice lead the way in letting go.
Welch began working on Everybody Scream after experiencing an ectopic pregnancy, a complication where a fertilized egg implants outside of the uterus, which can result in death. She had a miscarriage while touring behind Florence + the Machine’s last album, the defiantly liberatory Dance Fever, in the summer of 2023, and decided to work through it at first, storming through a mud-spattered set in Cornwall, England. A doctor visit revealed what she recently told The Guardian was “a Coke can’s worth of blood in my abdomen” because the egg had implanted in a fallopian tube; she lost that organ in emergency surgery and was back on the road within two weeks.
Everybody Scream does, at times, have the feeling of being a dispatch from someone who’s just returned from hell and whose most treasured souvenirs are crystal-clear vision and a tougher skin: “I crawled up from under the earth/Broken nails and coughing dirt,” she muses over gnarled guitars at the outset of “One of the Greats.” Over that astonishing cut’s nearly seven minutes, trilling strings and spectral choirs gather as Welch builds her list of grievances (including men who “make boring music just because [they] can”), at one point even trying her hand at semi-toxic positivity before realizing that she just needs to continue forging her own path as the song unwinds.
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Welch has always had a flair for the gothic, but the specter of death hangs over Everybody Scream as brightly
as sunlight, amping up the urgent thrum of her music. Her poetry and the music around it dig fully into clamor and chaos, thrilling in the stunning ugliness offered by the natural world and the inner self. Backing choirs on cuts like the fractured sea chantey “Kraken” and the frantically fluttering “Witch Dance” feel on the verge of fraying; the body-horror elegy “Drink Deep” rises from a primordial muck, Welch’s stretched-out vowels sounding increasingly sapped as she comes to the horrifying realization that those who have claimed to help her have resulted in her draining herself.
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“I no longer try to be good/It didn’t keep me safe, like you told me that it would,” Welch keens on “Sympathy Magic,” which feels like a world-weary mirror image of Florence + the Machine’s 2008 breakthrough hit “Dog Days Are Over.” That nagging existential doubt — what’s this all for, anyway? — crests on the album’s penultimate track, “You Can Have It All,” which flings poison-tipped darts at constraints of femininity with increasing ferocity as woodwinds sigh and strings close in. Welch stands on a cliff’s edge at the outset, grieving her lost pregnancy and questioning what she thought she knew; she tries to temper her outrage, but trying to “bury” any fury she feels only results in it growing and becoming more immovable. “And Love,” the heaven-borne closing track, is the sound of her coming to terms with that; she soars into the upper part of her range as she marvels at how “love was not what I thought it was,” a twinkling harp echoing that perhaps uneasy inner peace.
It’s an impressive testament to Welch’s artistic mastery that even though Everybody Scream ends on a quieter note, it’s still a dazzlingly thundering statement of finding catharsis by getting loud.
