In August 2023, Florence Welch was performing on stage when she suffered a miscarriage. The pregnancy was ectopic: her fallopian tube had ruptured and a Coke can’s worth of blood had accumulated in her abdomen. This life-altering event is the genesis that spurred Florence and the Machine’s sixth album, Everybody Scream.
The title track ushers listeners into Welch’s church with its organs and choral singing, before a thumping drum and propulsive glam-rock bass sets her sermon in motion. On “Everybody Scream” and “One of the Greats”, she muses on eminence: what it means (especially as a woman in music), how to achieve it, if it’s worth it. “Did I do it right?/Did I win the prize?” she asks, trying to reconcile fame and success with the brutality of ambition and the violence of greatness.
“Witch Dance”, “Sympathy Magic”, and “Perfume and Milk” are unflinching explorations of pagan-informed healing, macerated in soft pop-rock. “Trying to live but feeling so damaged”, Welch goes to “find hidden folk” in ancestral lands with falling leaves, rot and ruin. For her, spirituality is found in isolated ritual as much as it is in public performance. Piecing herself back together, she learns, is possible, and it lies somewhere between the softness of surrender and the fortification of resilience. Optimism pervades the harp-inflected concluding song, “And Love”, in which she chants “peace is coming”. Perhaps she has not found it yet, but there is comfort in its inevitably.
Welch has said this album came out of her “in a furious burst” and there’s a sense of urgency that moulds the record. Her preternatural talent for alchemising the material and the mythical has allowed her to metabolise her trauma; she has created a raw and eerily affecting album that is both grounded in real suffering and steeped in the ethereal. Perhaps there is nothing quite like the visceral pain of lived experiences that compels one to call on higher powers. For a record that is so shaped by the occult, it remains profoundly human.
[Further reading: Lily Allen’s nine lives]
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This article appears in the 06 Nov 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Exposed: Britain's next maternity scandal