Florence and the Machine is back

It may be coincidence or clever record company marketing, but the two current reigning queens of the British pop music scene, Lily Allen and Florence Welch, have released their two latest records within a week of one another. Allen, who has admittedly been more involved in acting and selling pictures of her feet on OnlyFans of late, brought out the excoriating and autobiographical West End Girl, which is said to explore the compromises and difficulties of her short-lived marriage to Stranger Things actor David Harbour. And, not to be outdone, Welch and her band Florence and the Machine have come back with her first album since 2022’s excellent Dance Fever; it promises another smorgasbord of operatic vocals, soaring choruses and BIG tunes. Does it work?

It would appear from the pre-release interviews that Welch has been giving that Everybody Scream – itself a title apparently so on the nose that it’s almost self-parodic – is also an exercise in exorcism, in that the singer is dealing with the aftermath of the miscarriage of an ectopic pregnancy in 2023 that almost killed her. While she isn’t as explicit about her personal issues as Allen, there is no doubt that the opening line of “One of the Greats,” when Welch sings “I crawled up from under the earth, broken nails and coughing dirt, spitting out my songs so you could sing along,” is deeply heartfelt.

Yet this should not be regarded simply as “a miscarriage album,” which would be a reductive and inaccurate way of describing Welch’s sixth studio record. Instead, it’s a wry and often blackly funny glance at the music industry that she’s been at the top of for over a decade and a half, since she first emerged, in suitably operatic and dramatic form, with 2009’s Lungs. Certainly, when Welch’s one-time duet partner Taylor Swift made an enormous song and dance of borrowing the iconography of Millais’ Ophelia on her underwhelming recent album The Life of a Showgirl, Florence might have been forgiven for sighing that she had done all this – and better – while Swift was still whinnying about being a country star.

The 39-year-old Welch is no ingenue, although her vocals are as stunning as ever, and she brings a welcome gravity to her lyrics. When, on “One of the Greats,” she sneers that “It must be nice to be a man and make boring music just because you can” – never mind that male artists of her longevity and success are an endangered species these days – she is epitomizing the struggles and challenges that she and her peers have faced in an industry that is still obsessed by youth and the Next Big Thing. As someone who had thought that Welch peaked around the time of her sophomore album, Ceremonials, with its poundingly dramatic, Arcade Fire-esque songs such as “No Light No Light” and “Shake It Off,” it was a pleasant surprise on Everybody Scream to find that Welch has considerably expanded her sonic palette.

On a song like “Buckle,” co-written with Mitski Miyawaki and co-produced by the National’s Aaron Dessner – as the rest of the album is – she flirts with acoustic balladry, lifted into the stratosphere with those astonishing vocals, just as on its successor, “Kraken,” there is an ebbing tension that finally explores into a “Heroes”-esque chorus, even as Welch declares, of her rivals, “And all of my peers, they had such potential, the swamp, it took them down. And my love, I have to tell you, I kissed them all and let them drown.”

Yet the richest is saved for (nearly) last. On perhaps the greatest song she’s ever recorded, “You Can Have It All” (the title perhaps an allusion to Johnny Cash/Nine Inch Nails’ “Hurt”?) she reflects, over increasingly dramatic strings and drums, to say nothing of bass clarinet and saxophone, on the existential aftermath of her miscarriage. As she repeats, over an arrangement that feels like the darkest Disney song never recorded, how she “dug a hole in the ground and buried a scream, and from it grew a big red tree, shining with jagged leaves, and when the wind blows, you can hear it,” the desolation and the pain meld with sensational songwriting.

Welch has hardly been a slouch in commercial success hitherto, but this represents a quantum leap forward. She might have undergone the most traumatic of experiences, but this stunning, vibrant album – undoubtedly one of 2025’s greatest – suggests that she is back, bitches, and we are all the richer for her return.