Florence Welch of Florence + the Machine/Photo: Florence + the Machine
It’s a mad, mad world for a woman. A noisy one, too. Here a “shut up and sit down,” there the procreationist directive to “hurry up and have children,” everywhere a cacophony of voices reminding the “Second Sex” of the limited number of things the female body is for.
To which Florence Welch, the frontwoman of Florence + the Machine, channeling female frustration the world over, replies, “Everybody Scream!”
The title of the band’s brilliant 2025 album, and the 2026 World Tour to support it, “Everybody Scream” is an aching cri de coeur that finds Welch singing poignantly about herself, and in so doing, singing also to our fraught political moment.
Welch has long explored the female experience through her own journey, airing passions, private fears, unapologetic ambition, and a lifelong battle with anxiety in songs so sweeping, grandiose and operatic that they take on the quality of myth.
Flame-haired, vintage-fashion-forward, and as revered by the music critical establishment as she is beloved by pop icon Taylor Swift, Welch crafts songs that chronicle the contemporary female experience, and at times speak uncannily to what may come. Like some modern-day, musical “Cassandra”—the title of one of Florence + the Machine’s best tracks—Welch has often spoken of what she calls the “strange subconscious prescience of songwriting.”
The original Florence + the Machine, formed in London in 2007, began as a duo with Welch and collaborator and keyboardist Isabella Summers, and soon expanded to include guitarist Rob Ackroyd, drummer Christopher Lloyd Hayden, and harpist Tom Monger. Their 2009 debut, “Lungs,” catapulted to number one in the U.K. and number fourteen on the U.S. Billboard charts, and they’ve remained a musical and cultural force ever since.
The band’s signature sound is layered, shimmering, lush and percussive, dominated by Welch’s range-defying voice. She sings beautifully, and here and there, for emphasis, slides into a sotto voce speaking voice that explores the boundary between song and poem. Florence + the Machine’s best music, populated by angels, demons and ghouls coming out to play, often verges on the mystical. And what other major band has made the harp a rock ’n’ roll essential?
Welch has endured the inevitable comparisons to Kate Bush and Stevie Nicks and a long list of larger-than-life female frontwomen. Yet she’s never been shy about also taking her inspiration from men, perhaps most notably the raw power of soul singers like Sam Cooke and Otis Redding, who didn’t so much sing as wield their extraordinary voices like moral weapons. In her twenties, Welch watched a YouTube video of one of Redding’s iconic 1967 performances of his proto-feminist hit “Try a Little Tenderness” on repeat, mesmerized. Welch, like Redding, often starts a song tenderly and within minutes builds to something big, bold and emotionally intense.
Florence + The Machine “Sympathy Magic” video by Autumn de Wilde
Seeing Florence + the Machine live is a revelation. No musician performing today, with the possible exception of Nick Cave, rivals Welch’s capacity to turn a rock concert into a transcendent, intensely physical revival. She sings with her whole body, finding music in movement, and relishes her rapport with the audience. Positively Dionysian in her energy, she stomps to the beat, most often barefoot, drumming on whatever she can lay hands on. In the early days she was a fearless crowd-surfer, lofted by adoring fans. She’s twice broken one of her feet on stage. Standing before a crowd, she waxes ecstatic.
“Everybody Scream,” like Florence + the Machine’s 2022 “Dance Fever,” marks a gradual departure from the band’s more raucous and tumultuous early records. Two decades into Welch’s storied career she’s making music that ponders the demands placed on the female body by performance, the grind of the music industry, and her own ambition, which she fears is at odds with her fluctuating desire for a life more conventional.
That the themes on “Everybody Scream” run darker and more starkly confessional than much of Welch’s earlier music makes a sad kind of sense. In 2023, while touring to promote “Dance Fever,” Welch, who was in the early stages of a pregnancy, miscarried onstage. Not long after, her doctor discovered that the pregnancy had been ectopic and one of her fallopian tubes had burst. She was rushed into life-saving emergency surgery.
Within days, Welch returned for the final two shows of the tour. In an interview, she described the decision to get back on stage as coping, not courage, telling Apple Music’s Zane Lowe that performing is “the only place where I feel like I have a sense of control and power… Whatever is here [onstage] is going to carry me through.”
Which leads us to “Everybody Scream”’s gorgeous, rage-soaked title track.
The song starts beatific—Welch has long been a fan of chamber music—with a churchy organ, wisping harp and angelic harmonies. Within seconds, though, it devolves into a sultry Welch vocal and a witch choir of shrill, untuned shrieks that make a mockery of harmony, whipping the sound, and our psyches, into a frenzy.
Welch sings of her own celebrity as curse and deliverance, meditates on the muse as her reason for being, and breaks loose from the shackles of expectation placed on women. Here I don’t have to be quiet / Here I don’t have to be kind, extraordinary, normal all at the same time. It’s music that invites us into a sonic space where song, dance, and, yes, plenty of rage-filled screaming become redemptive.
With its swingy, glam-inspired groove, “Everybody Scream” is at once danceable and sinister, a pact between Florence and the fans she’s sacrificed for, and been seduced by. How can I leave you when you’re screaming my name? But there’s something unabashedly political about a track on which Welch reminds other women, and perhaps herself, that there is more than one way to make meaning in the world.
Florence Welch of Florence + the Machine, 2025/Photo: Florence + the Machine
Welch’s own fame—the price paid, the ephemeral rewards—is the subject of many of the songs on “Everybody Scream.” Nowhere is this more in evidence than on the album’s most talked-about track, “One of the Greats.” In sound and vision, the song owes a debt to singer and poet Patti Smith, whom Welch has called her “North Star.” The song’s video—a long take of Welch in the back of a limo, wearing a menswear-inspired suit and dark sunglasses, and sucking languorously on a cigar—is ripped straight from French photographer Claude Gassian’s 1976 photo series of Smith during the tour for her legendary “Horses” album.
Initially written as a poem, “One of the Greats” is, in true Patti Smith fashion, spoken-sung. It was recorded on its first take, Welch reading her lyrics straight from the page, accompanied by the masterful guitarwork of Mark Bowen of Idles. It’s a song in which she imagines herself buried, her greatness under assault from “male tastes.” In the next breath, she is grandiosely envisioning herself making a record that lands on the “hundred greatest records of all time” list.
Self-doubting one minute, full of pique and hubris the next, she sings in a droning, funereal refrain—Arms outstretched, back from the dead/ Streetlights bursting overhead—as she finds her way again to the bright lights, ever the spectacle. With its death and resurrection themes, “One of the Greats” is constructed like a Sylvia Plath poem—the self-annihilation and triumph, the repeatedly imagined deaths which allow for (in Plath’s phrasing) the “comeback in broad day.” Welch’s own Lazarus act has her crawling out from under the grief of losing a child, returning to the stage, and wondering if she’s worthy of all the adulation. Did I get it right? Do I win the prize? / Do you regret bringing me back to life? One way or another, she’s going to make meaning out of all this pain.
In many ways, this album is the chronicle of a seeker. In writing “Everybody Scream,” and reconstituting her life after loss, Welch turned to the Warburg Institute, which houses one of the largest occult collections in Great Britain. There she read up on magic, divination, witchcraft and the things women might do (or not do) that could lead to execution: owning property, serving as a midwife, being childless, having a cat (JD Vance must have been taking notes).
That research animates a number of the songs on the album. “Witch Dance” is a marvel of heretic splendor, driven by a PJ Harvey-esque rhythm so twitchy, primal and sexy it makes us want to stand up for witches everywhere. It’s a song that redeems the sorrows of nontraditional women writ large. You can imagine dancing to it, late night, at a downtown club. Or a coven. Grounded by Gaelic keening, pagan in its passion, the song is an ode to female solidarity, as a mourning Welch retreats to the countryside and is greeted by a tribe of women who tell her they’ve been waiting for her.
The song “Perfume and Milk” continues the theme of healing, with lyrics that split the difference between prayer and spell. Well healing is slow / It comes and it goes. A glimpse of the sun then a flurry of snow / The first green shoots and a sudden frost/ Oh something is gained when something is lost. The song gives expression to Welch’s animist beliefs, as she lets herself be renewed gradually by the seasons and the ordinary miracles found in nature.
And what would any Florence + the Machine album be without a handful of love-or-something-like-it songs? On the charming “Buckle,” pop-simple and driven by a Kooks-worthy rhythm guitar, Welch sings about a man who by all apparent behavior—not answering texts for days, keeping her a secret, failing to show when she performs—isn’t worthy of her. Yet she’s hanging on. It’s a song exploring the masochistic side of passion, the part of us that wants to be humbled by love, even when we’ve chosen the wrong person. I’m not better than this, show me what I’m worth, Welch sings. Some lessons we learn the hard way, or not at all.
The more meditative “Music by Men” offers a subtle, two-sided take on relationship angst. She’s at least as much at fault as her lover, a musical collaborator whose ego is bigger than he knows. He finds her intimidating; she admits to a tendency toward boredom when their partnership requires work. This on-the-rocks couple contemplate “something called compromise,” which Florence tags, in deadpan, “a brand new concept I’ve never tried.” Her wistful refrain–Let it be us / Let it be home / Falling asleep and not looking at our phone—feels less like a lyric, and more like a prayer to repair the divide.
Its title notwithstanding, Florence + the Machine’s latest album is as much about resilience as rage. “This album is a scream, and an embrace,” Welch says in that same Zane Lowe interview. “The gift of going through something awful is that you can embrace someone who has gone through something awful, too.”
That something awful, for millions of people, is here, now. Welch speaks to the long, dark moment we find ourselves in, conjuring the spirit of every woman who’s ever been blamed for the damage done to her. She’s a singer who finds musical meaning in the shared struggle, reminding us through her emotionally raw, gorgeous, often transcendent songs, that there is power in the collective.
Come on, come on, I can take it / Give me everything you got / What else, what else, what else, what else? Welch sings. It’s a plea and a mantra. But more than anything, it’s a rallying cry.
Published in the print edition of the April 2026 issue, with the headline “A Righteous Scream: Florence + the Machine Makes Musical Sense of Our Moment.”
Anne K. Ream (Writer, “Touched by the Spirit”) is a writer and the co-founder of Center for Story & Witness, a global testimonial writing program for survivors of gender-based violence and other human rights violations. A frequent writer for Newcity, she is a contributor to “The Cambridge Companion to Bob Dylan” and the co-creator of Hear to Be Heard, a blues and rock benefit concert series.
R. Clifton Spargo (Writer, “Touched by the Spirit”), author of the novel “Beautiful Fools,” is a novelist, short-story writer and cultural and music critic. His writings on music have appeared in Huffington Post, The Yale Review, “The Cambridge Companion to Bob Dylan,” and regularly in Newcity. He is co-founder of Center for Story & Witness, and teaches creative writing at Yale University.
