Everybody Scream by Florence + The Machine Album Review
Florence Welch has always written like she’s trying to conjure a ghost out of her own ribs - a poet disguised as a frontwoman, forever dancing on the fault line between pain and transcendence. Everybody Scream, the sixth studio album from Florence + The Machine and their first since 2022’s Dance Fever, arrives on Halloween as if drawn from a séance, contouring with mysticism, grief, and rebirth.
In the years since her last record, Welch has survived surgery, silence, and the strange ritual of healing, turning hurt into history, or rather, blood into mythology. The album, steeped in black tea and bergamot, is a gift of witchcraft and womanhood that feels like a spell circle closing at last: wild, holy, and unashamedly human. Released on the most haunted night of the year, it's an aesthetic and cinematic experience of vulnerability, pain and healing.
More than a return, Everybody Scream feels like a resurrection; like exorcising a body to save the soul, screaming not in fear, but in freedom. To set her soul free. It thematically explores:
Womanhood & body: The album traces the weight of female embodiment, the forces that shape and break the body, and the rituals of being heard.
Partnership & aging & mortality: Between the chords and verses, there’s a whisper of what it means to last, to heal, to forgive. The murky in the mundane is made musical.
Mysticism & chaos: Witchcraft is used less than a metaphor and more like memory and invocation. The record casts spells with grand gestures and in the spaces between notes.
Expect grandeur tempered by fragility. Expect a voice that knows its limits and has chosen to shatter them anyway. The guitars may soar, but the heart beneath them is wounded and wise. Expect the theatrical (a la Florence’s historic style) but with an edge darker than before: less dance-fever, more ritual, more incantation.
The title track, Everybody Scream, opens like a séance — eerie, ghost-touched, trembling between beauty and collapse. Ethereal organ swells rise against pounding drums, piercing screams, and quarter-note bass pulses that echo like footsteps in an empty chapel. There’s a heaviness here that’s also sacred — the sound of a heart dragging itself through a graveyard.
Welch’s voice enters as if mid-prayer, quivering and raw, but pervaded with power and confession, circling around the question she’s wrestled with her entire career: What does it cost to keep giving yourself away? Her words conjure the body as altar, performance as sacrifice, and womanhood as a kind of holy exhaustion.
“Here, I don't have to quiet / Here, I don't have to be kind / Extraordinary and normal, all at the same time / But look at me run myself ragged / Blood on the stage / But how can I leave you when you're screaming my name?”
The arrangement moves like a ritual in volatile stages: organ drones holding a low, haunted light while tom-heavy drums muscle the pulse forward; bass hits on the quarter notes like a lantern swinging in a storm. Violent but melodic screams flash through the mix. Not spectacle, but voltage, splitting the air so the melody can pour out unsettled and unornamented. Midway, the song opens, just enough to bleed; a release where the orchestra breathes and the drum pattern staggers, as if catching itself on the edge of the altar. Then everything returns, heavier and more human, the percussion wider, the bass fuller, her voice rising over it like an unforgettable vow. It doesn’t explode so much as endure, translating restless exhaustion into a kind of power: performance as penance, devotion as oxygen.
Collaborators Mitski and Aaron Dessner help shape this communion: Mitski’s spectral harmonies hang like fruit, while Dessner’s production roots the track in passion. Visually, the mood is cinematic — like a red dress digging a hole in a dark field, screaming into earth and sky alike. That soil holds the sound. That scream echoes in the roots.
By the time music fades, you can hear the record’s thesis written in the body with the choir leaving their echo, like a breath torn open into voice, agony evolving into strength. Which is why One of the Greats doesn’t just follow; it arrives like the next step of the same rite, dirt still under the nails.
The second track, “One of the Greats”, is filled with chilling grit — drums hiking on the offbeat, the raw, coarse texture of guitars clawing through the static like ghosts unearthing themselves. The arrangement feels heavily armed, yet intimate; singer-songwriter strums blur into a stoned-edge frenzy. Welch’s voice hovers above it all, a melodic hum that trembles between prayer and possession. As if her artful lyrics were sterile enchantments summoning spirits, the music follows her voice in devoted orchestration, each note wrapped around her amber intonations as she sings, “I crawled up from under the earth, broken nails and coughing dirt.”
It’s a song about death and rebirth — the persecuted soul clawing its way out from the grave of womanhood in a patriarchal world. Every line feels like the echo of a long poem fighting for perfection, validation, and acceptance. The lyrics web through love and loss, a narrative reborn through the near-death experience Welch herself survived: a life cracked open, then re-stitched with grace.
She told Our Culture Magazine that the song was “a long poem” recorded in one take with IDLES’ Mark Bowen. The final version, produced with Aaron Dessner, aims to feel like “a process of disintegration and rebirth.”
She sings: “Try to impress my childhood dream made flesh. / In my dresses and my flowering sadness, / so like a woman profiting from her madness. / I was only beautiful under the lights, only powerful there. / Oh, and down at 36 — why did you dig me up for this?”
The song fades as an exhale of the weight of those years. The silence after feels like a cracked mirror; jagged, but shimmering.
After the burial of One of the Greats, “Witch Dance” is a resurrection that’s euphoric, enchanting, and bewitching. Tangled in glistening piano, apprehensive breaths, and a tribal, and Afro-Cuban-inspired clave beat, the rhythm feels ritualistic, like a match striking the dark.
The pattern itself was built from physical movement, a choreography turned heartbeat inspired by the German piece Hexentanz. The panting breaths become percussion, grounding the song in the body: a journey to an ancestral plane where answers hum beneath the skin.
Every moment here is lush with emblematic detail, like an abundance of vines wrapping themselves around a tree. Welch’s voice shivers beneath orchestral ornaments, unveiling a bridal veil of vulnerability and divine femininity. I see her in a lacy ivory gown, trembling in her own light grasping onto the embodiment of desire, destruction, and the restless search for peace.
She begins:“His blackberry mouth stains my nightgown, I pull him close…” and pleads, “Show me the way. This feeling leaves the ache, the kick, the need.” The lyrics wander through visions of hidden folk, ancestral spirits, and earth-bound magic that bruises and blesses in equal measure:“I came to a clearing, a well full of wailing and keening… / And I met every monster from the bar to Broadway… / After all, there’s nobody more monstrous than me.”
The song glows in a haze of smoke and mirrors - the cyclical breath of awakening, fighting, surrender, and exhaustion.
Short and sweet, “Buckle” feels like a reprieve - the sound of a heart learning to love again, cautiously, almost shyly. It’s soft, simple, and disarmingly human, like the sensation of meeting someone who instantly feels like home.
In the key of B major, fresh guitar strings glisten with introspection as Welch melts into devotion and simplicity. She contemplates heartbreak with painful humor: “Then you close the door and leave me screaming on the floor… / Oh, baby, I just buckle, I can’t take it anymore…”
It’s the emotional seesaw between surrender and survival - loving fully despite the risk of breaking. Buckle accepts that love and pain can coexist, and that peace sometimes lives in the act of staying open. Beneath its comforting melody, there’s an ache that feels honest, as if the song itself is therapy, helping her process the wounds she still dares to touch.
“The Old Religion” answers with something ancient and immense. Its melancholy opening recalls the ghost of a cathedral piano that’s rich, resonant, and humming like a spell from another century.
I’m transported back to my own days as a music major, hours spent alone in a small room with a vintage Steinway grand — its top notes ringing like tiny bells. That same ache lives here: reverent, haunting, and sacred. Welch sings: “And it’s the old religion humming in your veins, / Some animal instinct starting up again…”
The chorus blooms into gothic grandeur with strings unfurling, drums booming, and a choir layered like candlelight in stained glass.
In her Radio X interview, Welch described writing this song in the Hudson Valley with Aaron Dessner, drawing from 90s witchcraft films like The Craft and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. She said she wanted to make something that sounded like “running through a haunted forest” — gothic romance, addiction, mysticism, and the hunger to escape the body all colliding in sound. And that’s exactly what it is. It’s feral, cinematic, and alive with the ache to transcend.
With a grand, thematic closure, “And Love” feels like the answer to the scream that began the record. It’s hushed, almost a whisper through the rubble, yet carrying the burden and hope of resurrection.
The instrumentation dissolves into something ethereal: sparse triad piano chords, the hum of a sparkling, electronic keyboard organ, Florence’s voice seeping like light through cracked glass. After all the ghosts, rituals, and rebirths, she arrives at the simplest truth that love, in all its brutal persistence, is what survives the ruins. “Peace is coming,” she reminds. “And love, and love, and love,” she repeats. Not as a plea, but as a spell that finally worked.
It feels like dawn after dusk, a reminder that the scream was never just full of pain, but also the sound of freedom, and a soul remembering it was still alive.
This album smells like faint smoke, cashmere, aged wine, and dark amber wood. The scent of something burned and beloved; the residue of love, hope and survival. Like a perfume full of memories.
Everybody Scream feels less like a collection of songs and more like a resurrection wrapped in velvet. Each track is a ritual of release, a confrontation between the body and the divine. Florence Welch doesn’t simply write about pain — she sanctifies it, turns it fragrant and physical. Her voice is both a weapon and wound; her lyrics, a haunted spell burned in candlelight.
There’s a striking duality running through every chord of this record — grief and grace, chaos and clarity, love as rebirth. Florence doesn’t just perform healing; she bleeds it into being. And through her, we’re reminded that womanhood isn’t a curse to outrun, but magic to reclaim; ancient, imperfect, and infinite.
In listening, I find my own reflection rippling back: the ache of wanting to become whole, to be myself without holding back, the quiet joy in realizing that wholeness was never purity, but persistence. These songs unravel the myth of a “good woman.” They allow her to scream, to haunt, to desire, to weep, to worship. To be.
The album ends not with a confined closing, but with a slow inhale, a ‘yes and.’ It resolves on the note of love returning as both question and answer. Where love is the story that always continues and never ends.
And maybe that’s what Everybody Scream ultimately is: the sound of Florence Welch, and all of us, remembering how to live after the fire, even with burns.
K E E P U P W I T H
