ALBUM REVIEW: Florence & The Machine – Everybody Scream

Polydor Records
Released: 31.10.25

For more than a decade, Florence Welch has served as pop’s high priestess of grandiose feeling – a cathedral-voiced visionary who could make torment sound like deliverance. On her sixth album, Everybody Scream, Welch turns her gaze inwards, tracing the scar line between survival and rhapsody. Written and produced in close collaboration with Mark Bowen of IDLES, The National’s Aaron Dessner and Mitski,
the record feels at once intimate and incantatory – an act of ritual rebirth conducted in real-time.

Welch began crafting this project after a near-fatal health scare during the Dance Fever tour, and the body’s fragility thrums hauntingly beneath these songs. The occult leitmotifs she leans into – wiccan revelries, corporeal reanimation, uncanny visions – now read less as theatre than testimony. Healing, the opening title track suggests, is never clean; it’s ecstatic and grotesque in equal measure.

On One of the Greats, she wrestles with her own mythos, musing aloud if survival itself counts as success. Elsewhere, Kraken sees grief rendered as both a drowning and baptism, whilst Drink Deep flits between paganish devotion and modern self- obliteration.

Musically, the production deftly tempers Welch’s bombastic impulses – shimmering guitars, booming percussion and ethereal harmonies, all cranked to cosmic levels – with raw humanity, de-emphasising spectacle for connection. Music By Men seethes quietly, a pawky feminist spell disguised as folk lament; You Can Have It All and And Love close things out with something startlingly plainspoken – a woman standing still amidst the wreckage, finding grace in the din.

Across her oeuvre – from the feral tenderness of Lungs through to Dance Fever’s lustral candour – Welch has chased transcendence. Here, she doesn’t chase at all. She simply inhabits it.