FLORENCE + THE MACHINE - Everybody Scream

There's a spiritual mysticism, a courtly dark-folk, a deeply gothic art, shadowy yet vital, that shows through in the lines and sounds of the new album by Florence + The Machine, titled “Everybody Scream” in the name of an emotional universality capable of exploding within each of us. We need to dig deep inside ourselves, to know ourselves and to know, in order to always land in new personal and collective universes able to gauge the perception we have of ourselves and to calibrate it against the one with which we look at and feel what surrounds us.

Florence Welch has faced the most recent period of her life on a path of rebirth, awareness and healing, first physical and ultimately artistic, which echoes throughout the album and bears the mark of the process of renewal and reclamation she has had to come to terms with. During the 2022-23 “Dance Fever Tour” she had to undergo surgery that saved her life, forcing her to cancel the dates for what had been an album made during the pandemic, deeply wanted and inspired, a product of major artistic value for the band, considering the historical moment it emerged from.

“Everybody Scream” is released specifically on Halloween, the day when the boundary between the living and the dead is so thin that it creates a single pagan celebration dissolving time, where spiritual and earthly entities solemnly coexist. The album's opening track, the eponymous, evocative lead single, invites us to cross the threshold into whatever lies beyond, to march toward the start of a journey somewhere between “Alice in Wonderland” and “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”, between sensory imagination and fantasy.

In “One Of The Greats”, the second single released from the album, there's a suspension of time and an intimate reflection tying Florence Welch to the deepest sense of mortality and fame as a great artist operating within a music industry that is perhaps still too patriarchal – “It must be nice to be a man and make boring music just because you can/ now don’t get me wrong I’m a fan/ you’re my second favourite frontman” – one that tends to decide the artistic worth of anyone who sits at its table from behind closed doors. The whole thing was played and sung in a single take, accompanied by the guitar of Mark Bowen of Idles, lending the track an even more expressive, definitive aura.

Magical atmospheres, dark–glam textures, sonic intrigue, the harp, an ancestral dancing mania as an act meant to exorcise the present and send its participants into ecstasy, creating a mystical, devoted community, accompany us throughout the entire album. “Witch Dance”, “Sympathy Magic”, “Perfume And Milk” alternate alt-pop touches with electronics, ethereal choirs, guitars that are hinted at but never too intrusive; “Kraken” and “The Old Religion” summon the kind of sonic crescendo typical of the London band, as does “You Can Have It All”, where the choral backdrop involuntarily recalls Fontaines Dc's “A Hero's Death”, and the melodic, sonic sustain bears the stamp of production by Aaron Dessner, guitarist of The National and producer of the album, as well as Mark Bowen, also a producer alongside Welch herself and James Ford.

“Music By Men” unconsciously pulls me toward “Far From Any Road” by The Handsome Family, chosen as the main theme for the first season of “True Detective“, another unintentional association in which the occult accompanied its protagonists on a personal and collective journey of exploration. “Drink Deep” is the most expressive, shamanic track on the whole album. Excellent production and intimate performance, a lysergic-musical rite, hypnotic, meditative, in which the deep, vibrato-laden, sustained voice embraces us completely and grants us access inside “the hidden folk” that Welch has found through a continual search through mythology and oral tradition, like a modern-day Loreena McKennitt.

The theatrical, decadent imagery of exploratory rites amid woods and fires, and real stages set between audience and artificial lights, lets us soar gracefully through the depths of our own intimacy, thanks to a frank and revealing portrayal of the complexity, at times primitive, of human nature.

“And Love” is the closing track of the orchestral rite we've taken part in, “peace is coming” is the line repeated almost like a messianic loop and, to borrow from the poet, “we emerged to see the stars once more” after a process of confrontation and clash between the forces that govern us.

"Everybody Scream" is an album of tension and expansion, more minimalist and intimate than the rest of Florence + The Machine's output, one in which hushed sonics and dark digressions indulge in baroque eccentricity, art-pop and folk horror.

In the preface to her book of poetry, “Useless Magic – Lyrics and Poetry”, which here too involuntarily traces a kinship – more human than musical – with Billy Corgan and his own book of poems “Blinking With Fists – Poem”, Florence Welch writes that she doesn't know how a song becomes a song and a poem becomes a poem, they simply flow through us. “You can have everything,” the preface goes on to declare. Having reached this point, and staying on theme, whether through headphones or on the stereo, take it and enjoy, all of you.

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02/11/2025