“Let me put out a record and not have it ruin my life,” Florence Welch sings on ‘Music by Men’, a relatively unassuming song from her latest album that cuts to its very core. From the outside, Welch is just about the least chaotic frontperson of her generation, having not just crossed over into but deeply influenced mainstream pop and its embrace of extravagance. It’s not fame that comes close to destroying her life, Everybody Scream suggests, but the very human drive to push through the body’s limits, to satisfy her compulsion to perform. Welch may indulge in magical realism here and there, but the visceral origins of these songs are hard to overstate: in 2023, complications from a miscarried ectopic pregnancy forced her into emergency surgery mid-tour, which saved her life and prompted an exploration of witchcraft and pagan imagery. Still seeking cathartic release, she delivers a torrential and shadowy record that’s anything but lacking in big choruses and brutal confrontation. But underlying them is some of her most intimate music, granting herself permission for peace outside the spotlight even as she’s preternaturally drawn to it.
1. Everybody Scream
A couple years back, Welch released a cover of No Doubt’s ‘Just a Girl’ for the second season of Yellowjackets, where a couple of her Dance Fever songs are also featured. The show’s fourth season is slated to begin production next year, and they should already start teasing it with ‘Everybody Scream’ – the rapturous, spell-binding opening track that finds Welch commanding a group of women capable of possessing whoever they meet. Introducing Welch’s fascination with the history of witchcraft and its intersection with medicine – “The spells and the injections/ The harvest, the needle, protect me from evil” – it also boils with the tension of compromising personal health for the pleasure of an audience, a theme surely relatable to Mitski, who co-wrote and plays acoustic piano on the song. With IDLES’ Mark Bowen, James Ford, and Aaron Dessner on production, plus Kenneth Blume on drum programming and a deep throat choir in the background, the energy is off the rails: not just communal, but inescapable.
2. One of the Greats
If ‘Everybody Scream’ is the ritual summoning Welch back from the dead, ‘One of the Greats’ is the raw, cheeky, ludicrous outpouring that follows: “Do you regret bringing me back to life?” she taunts. She’s still standing up there on the stage – this isn’t some behind-the-curtains confessional for the heads, it’s a full-on single that stretches out to nearly seven minutes – and she makes sure not everyone watching is totally comfortable with it. “Now don’t get me wrong, I’m a fan, you’re my second favourite front man/ And you could have me if you weren’t so afraid of me/ It’s funny how men don’t find power very sexy,” she sings. Bowen and Dessner’s production instincts seem to clash a little here – the strings vying for space over that muscular bass – but it’s lyrically and vocally marvelous, with barely-audible backing vocals from none other than Ethel Cain.
3. Witch Hunt
The song begins ravenous with the kind of desire Welch lyrically describes as “beyond reason/ A ruinous thing.” But it’s also one of the most instantly dynamic songs in her catalog, flexing the emotional and actual range of her singing when she declares “I have many, many miles yet to cross” as much as it’s grounded in a purely guttural performance. Glistened by some additional production from Danny L Harle, who contributes an array of synths, the song illuminates the earthly, enormous depths of what’s deemed monstrous: beyond reason, maybe, but thrumming for purpose.
4. Sympathy Magic
The weakest of the album’s advance singles, ‘Sympathy Magic’ seeks consolation from “the vague humiliations of fame” but ends up feeling vaguely distant – the synthetic instrumentation doesn’t do much justice to Welch in all her howling prowess. It’s got a chorus that sticks, but its verses don’t reel you in like other songs on the album.
5. Perfume and Milk
Returning to the bare-bones candor of ‘One of the Greats’, the song burrows inward while reveling in the cycles of the natural world. With just Dessner co-producing alongside Welch, it earns its strange sense of smallness, of trying to read Revelations of Divine Love on a smart device but failing to fall into a satisfying rhythm. “Well, healing is slow/ It comes and it goes,” she concedes, noticing the seasons change and reminding herself there’s hope in the going, too.
6. Buckle
Another Mitski co-write, this one is backed by mostly acoustic instrumentation, rendering the artists’ converging feelings on fame all the more palpable. “I wanna call you on the telephone/ I made a thousand people love me/ Now I’m all alone,” it begins, “And my resolve is sinking like a stone.” There’s no poetic pretense here, no references to witchcraft – the language is simple and human with some clever turns of phrase, which has a way of demystifying the songwriters’ mythically elevated stature. I wonder if Mitski declined to sing on this one – at least some of the backing vocals feel like they should belong to her.
7. Kraken
Reuniting Welch with her Dance Fever collaborator Dave Bayley (of Glass Animals), the song fires the album’s momentum back up, delivering a wordless refrain as euphoric as ‘Everybody Scream’ while invoking Sylvia Plath’s ‘Lady Lazarus’: “As I fix you in the gaze of my one unblinking eye/ Well, do I terrify?” The stare is captured in the song’s unyielding chord, but the arrangement comes alive to announce the narrator’s transformation.
8. The Old Religion
Even in the depths of her exhaustion, Welch can’t help being a little tongue-in-cheek: “It’s your troubled hero/ Back for season six/ When it’s at its darkest, it’s my favourite bit.” If the darkness of Dance Fever felt theatrical, on Everybody Scream it comes straight from the gut, casting faith not as part of some conceptual framework so much as a deeper spiritual hunger. This is not quite the moment of release; Dessner and Welch’s production holds back, leaving you intentionally wanting more.
9. Drink Deep
The song may be leaning more overtly into folk-horror tropes, but it’s one that feels unsettlingly personal. While Welch admits to feeling powerless on the previous song, here it’s all shown: the potion she’s compelled to drink causes her body to deteriorate, only for her to realize it is made from her. In the absence of cathartic release, she indulges in destructive patterns mirrored in the song’s cascading vocals. She promptly resists the urge to reach her higher register, succumbing to the deep hum even as the instrumentation crescendos.
10. Music By Men
‘One of the Greats’ is what most listeners would expect ‘Music By Men’ to be; rather than letting resentment unspool, the song anticipates and negotiates with it in sincere, complicated fashion. Over little more than strummed acoustic guitar, you have to take her lyrics at face value; it’s not about her status as a woman in music so much as how little her fame matters inside, while still affecting, the reality of her domestic life – her ability to maintain relationships, a semblance of home. The physical hardships she’s endured are almost an afterthought – breaking her foot onstage, completing the gig, and getting a 4/5 review for it – when the emotional work is so hefty. “Let there be love,” she sighs ultimately, “Let there be light.” And quietly, as if to clarify: not the kind that hurts.
11. You Can Have It All
This is the much-anticipated release, an imposing vision of abundance adorned with lustrous strings. The scream is planted and weaponized not just as a musical tool but a natural force: “Am I a woman now?” she asks, sounding ten times bigger than the voices belting out the chorus.
12. And Love
Sadness is not the only thing that can be misread upon arrival; the singer was also wrong about love, which, she admits, “crept up on me despite myself.” Tom Moth’s harp, invoking classic Florence + the Machine, is given a moment to shine, casting love not as something to run toward but simply surrender to. And simple as a conclusion to the album as it may seem, it gains weight in its resistance to restlessness. After all, it’s far from a fairytale ending: “More like an animal crawling deep into a cave/ Than a romance novel heroine being swept away.” Everybody Scream creeps up on you much the same way, as surprisingly tender as it is enchanting.
