“It’s your troubled hero / Back for season six”, Florence Welch sings on ‘The Old Religion’ – a note of irony ringing through her distinctly sirenic voice. Yet rather than a tale of her singular torment, her sixth album as Florence + The Machine – the aptly-titled ‘Everybody Scream’ – mostly operates as a collective exorcism of the horrors and hopes inherent to womanhood.
Weeks ahead of the album’s release, Welch revealed to the Guardian that the catalyst for writing had been an ectopic pregnancy that had threatened her life while she was on tour. She underwent an emergency surgery and only 10 days later, in spite of the mental trauma and physical toll of miscarriage, resumed performing, adamant not to cancel two final shows.
While 2022’s ‘Dance Fever’ wrestled with the option of motherhood, much of ‘Everybody Scream’ dwells on mortality, often resembling both an homage and a prayer to generations of women who came before and will come after. It’s an album that aches and pulses with a sense of urgency – catharsis perhaps too plain a word to define the frenzy that runs through it.
Welch’s near-death experience led to her seeking a more animalistic approach to singing, embracing ululations and medieval vocal practices to transform the voice into a raw instrument. She returned to opera training, resulting in one of her most powerful vocal performances to date, and enlisted the Idrîsî Ensemble – a musical group that specialises in medieval repertoire – and the Deep Throat Choir – an all-female vocal collective – to evoke a sense of communal dread, dubbed her “witch choir”.
It’s perhaps most prominent on ‘Witch Dance’, so vivid and alive, it’s as if the song is unfolding in a woodland clearing, where bodies twitch and shudder under a stream of silver light from the full moon. ‘Drink Deep’ evokes further creepiness, wind chimes twinkling against the foreboding beat of an ancient drum as she delivers lyrics with the rhythm of a spell being cast.
Though informed by Wicca history and classic literature (the Brontë sisters and Mary Shelley named as specific inspirations), ‘Everybody Scream’ is still an unmistakably timely record, expertly treading between folk and mysticism observations on the disconnect of a chronically online generation clutching at new age practices for relief. ‘Perfume and Milk’ is a doomscroll through TikTok tarot readers, as she croons of “Downloading revelations divine love on my phone,” and “Trying to read but getting distracted”, while on ‘Kraken’ she vents “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.”
Welch’s presentation of the brutal, ugly and raw sides of femininity also arrives during a time when women are increasingly sliced and nipped and tucked, pressured to be eternally young, thin, and pretty. Though it’s an autobiographical album, it channels the rage of a cohort that sees their reproductive rights under threat or, for trans women, their very existence offered up for debate.
It also deals with the experiences of sexism in the music industry today. ‘One Of The Greats’ recounts her frenzied attempts to surpass the criticism that mired her early career, while pointing to the larger disparity between male and female artists, the former permitted to stand and sing their songs in a pair of faded jeans, while the latter must dazzle and innovate, maintaining a crucial façade of perfection. ‘Music By Men’ sees her surrender, “slide down in my seat not to threaten you” while “listening to a song by The 1975”, while the anthemic ‘You Can Have It All’, almost primed for a Bond theme complete with an immense string chorus, asks: “A piece of flesh, a million pounds, am I a woman now?”
There’s no easy, radio-friendly hit here, nor a euphoric finale, with the album instead departing on a small exhale. “The gift of going through something awful is that you can embrace someone who’s been through it too,” Welch said in a recent interview. Album closer ‘And Love’, then, is her final embrace, fluttering away in a haze of classic Florence + The Machine harp and distant murmurs of “peace is coming”. It’s a succinct and surprising end to a tempestuous record, one that stays with you longer than the rage and anguish which, here, is as fleeting, yet deeply magical, as the changing seasons.
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