“It’s your troubled hero / Back for season six,” Florence Welch sings on ‘The Old Religion,’ irony curling through that unmistakably captivating voice. But rather than another chapter in her story, Florence’s sixth album, titled Everybody Scream, feels more like a shared exorcism: a reckoning with the horrors and hopes embedded in womanhood.
Weeks before the record’s release, Welch told The Guardian that its creation began after an ectopic pregnancy nearly took her life mid-tour. She underwent emergency surgery and, just ten days later, forced herself back onstage to finish the final shows, a decision that captures the tension at the album’s heart: resilience at war with fragility.
That brush with death pushed her towards something more primal. Welch returned to opera training, exploring ululations and medieval vocal practices that treat the voice less as melody and more as raw material. Backed by the Idrîsî Ensemble, specialists in medieval repertoire, and the all-female Deep Throat Choir (her self-described “witch choir”), she constructs a sound world steeped in ritual and release.
The title track, ‘Everybody Scream,’ brings Welch back to the stage, her place of worship and wounding. Written with Mitski, it examines the intimacy she feels with performance itself: a space that consumes her but also keeps her alive. “What is it that keeps drawing me back?” she asks, half in awe, half in exhaustion.
The album’s brutal honesty lands at a time when femininity feels increasingly commodified, sliced, filtered, and edited into something palatable. Though its lyrics are deeply personal, ‘Everybody Scream’ resonates as a collective howl: from women watching their reproductive rights stripped away, to trans women fighting for the right to simply exist.
On ‘Perfume and Milk,’ Welch doomscrolls through TikTok tarot readers, sighing, “Downloading revelations divine love on my phone,” while confessing she is “trying to read but getting distracted.” ‘Kraken’ dives deeper: “Sometimes my body seems so alien to me / I quiet it down by watching TV / But grow restless and grow hungry as the water rises up around me.” It is grotesque, tender, and painfully human, the sea as both comfort and curse.
She also takes aim at the misogyny still stitched through the music industry. On ‘One of the Greats,’ she relives her obsession with perfection, the desperate urge to outshine her critics, while exposing the gendered double standard that lets men perform in faded jeans while women are expected to reinvent the wheel nightly.
By the album’s end, Everybody Scream feels less like a record and more like a ritual, a long, guttural sigh that leaves you lighter. It is the sound of Florence Welch, and all of us, stepping into a field at dusk, ready to scream the world back into shape.
Florence and the machine: Everybody Scream – Out 31 October 2025 (Polydor Records)
