Florence + The Machine - Everybody Scream

Few records have as much claim to a title as dramatic as ‘Everybody Scream’ as Florence + The Machine’s sixth full-length, a work born out of trauma both specific and general. In 2023, while touring last LP ‘Dance Fever’, Florence Welch - the project’s eponymous creative force - miscarried an ectopic pregnancy and underwent life-saving surgery before returning to the stage just weeks later. It was, in some ways, a horror-laden manifestation of this album’s overarching assertion: that you don’t survive nearly two decades in a systemically sexist, famously fickle industry without sustaining some serious scars.

Such wounds obviously run deep, but here paganism, witchcraft, and the Gothic have apparently proved a salve - influences which are writ large across the ‘The Old Religions’’s war-mongering drums and ‘Drink Deep’’s swelling, almost sacrificial choral crescendo. In the organ-flecked opening title track, Florence’s incantation-like cadence is echoed by haunting banshee wails and chanted directives (“Dance!”; “Move!”; “Jump!”); in ‘Kraken’, she casts herself as the mythological sea monster, subsuming her “peers” - as indeed she has with all but a few of her fellow late noughties luminaries - to enduringly dominate the (air)waves. Both are expressions of extraordinary power - a power Florence well knows she possesses - but equally present a confronting home truth: at what personal cost comes fame?

Over these 12 tracks, she frames her relationship with the spotlight as that of a toxic partner, craving the adoration and attention it offers while equally acknowledging the damage it inflicts, feeling trapped - disgusted, even - by her own compulsions. It’s an addiction she can’t shake, a poison she self-administers. Nowhere is this more potent than ‘One Of The Greats’ and ‘Music By Men’: the former, a quietly furious, acerbic rumination on her safety glass ceiling (“I’ll be up there with the men and the 10 other women in the hundred greatest records of all time / It must be nice to be a man / And make boring music, just because you can”, she scoffs over creeping Velvet Underground guitars); the latter, a simultaneously self-flagellating and accusatory ditty that’s deftly saved from cringe ‘men are trash’ territory by the even-handedness of her vitriol (“You have a bigger ego than you think you do / Slide down in my seat so as not to threaten you”).

Penultimate track ‘You Can Have It All’, then, is the amalgamation of all of the above, a string-led, cinematic epic that pairs Florence’s longtime hallmarks - theatricality, poetry, femininity - with the grit and grief of her lost battles; as the strings squall in the track’s final throes, there’s more than a hint of bitter irony to the titular words. If her 2008 debut ‘Lungs’ was the deep breath of plunging into the depths, ‘Everybody Scream’ is the resounding, cathartic exhalation of finally reaching the surface once more.