Florence + the Machine’s newest album, “Everybody Scream,” was released on Halloween — a fitting date for a work so haunted and imploring.
Florence Welch, the group’s singer-songwriter, has been a fixture of the indie rock world for years. Now, she’s fully embraced her status as a star, and “Everybody Scream” is full of the insecurity and experimentation that often comes with a long time in the spotlight. Few people have experienced the hyper-visible world of stardom, so when artists sing about it, they must be both honest and relatable. Welch pulls this off flawlessly.
“Everybody Scream” is a musical reckoning with both Welch’s career and her personal life. Like a witch’s incantation, the first tracks are bold and angry. Welch’s voice is soaring — almost operatic — as she uses dramatic metaphors and fantastical illusions to convey her relationship with fame and her body. True to the album’s title, she screams.
But this doesn’t keep Welch from being heartbreakingly vulnerable. In “Sympathy Magic,” one of the record’s standout songs, she sings about her journey on the stage and in her personal life. She conjures the image of herself “crouched in a ball gown / Anxious and ashamed,” and proclaims, “I no longer try to be good.” The lines give the impression that Welch is like a wounded animal, lashing out.
This imagery is characteristic of much of Welch’s songwriting: She is unafraid of the ugly, the gory and the animal. Her music frequently draws from the connection between horror and femininity. In the song “Kraken,” for instance, Welch asserts herself both as a woman and a monster: “My tentacles so tender, as I caress your cheek,” she sings.
It is this courage that truly sets Welch apart from her contemporaries. As much as she may sing about desiring beauty, she doesn’t depict herself as just “beautiful.” Rather, as Welch sings in “Kraken,” she is both “glamorous and ravenous.”
But that doesn’t mean it’s easy for Welch to embrace femininity in the music industry. In “One of the Greats,” a triumphant and rageful track, Welch denounces sexism in music with seething sarcasm. She sings that she’ll “be up there with the men and the ten other women (Ah-ah) / In the hundred greatest records of all time (Ah-ah).” The song is full of witty poeticisms and cheeky bites at the music world: “So like a woman to profit from her madness,” she sings, noting that “it must be nice to be a man and make boring music just because you can.”
In some of her strongest points in the album, Welch lets the record slow down. The most acoustic track, “Music by Men,” is like a crack in the monster’s skin, baring Welch’s heart. “Let me put out a record and have it not ruin my life,” she implores.
Welch’s present-day experience with womanhood is informed by her life in the spotlight and by her 2023 miscarriage, which she discussed in a vulnerable interview with The Guardian that explored the basis of “Everybody Scream.” In the band’s most recent record, she conveys a complicated and often adverse relationship to femininity. The Florence Welch of “Everybody Scream” is bold, ravenous and angry — traits traditionally associated with men — and she lets her strikingly low voice reach its depths. Still, Welch is steadfastly committed to her feminine power. In “Everybody Scream,” she proves that womanhood need not be delicate: Instead, it can have teeth.
