Florence Welch Learns How to Scream
The title track on “Everybody Scream,” the new album by Florence and the Machine, opens with a synth organ layered over an eerie choral harmony. In the video, directed by Autumn de Wilde, Florence Welch stands on a low stage in a sixteenth-century manor house with a crowd of people—old men in suits, women in black gowns—convulsing around her, as if she is leading a mass exorcism. A coven of witches in white blouses and long skirts leap onto tables, eyes bulging and teeth bared. Welch, who is wearing a crimson-red dress and matching heels, spits flowers onto a man as she writhes over him. Somehow, it works.
Known for her red hair, bohemian dress, and pagan-inspired lyrics, Welch has brought gothic fanfare to pop music for nearly two decades. In her songs, she regularly communes with demons, ghosts, and devils. She has described her live performances as an “agnostic church.” Her voice is her most powerful weapon, sonorous and ethereal as she dances around cavernous stages. For her previous album, “Dance Fever,” she drew inspiration from Pre-Raphaelite art, medieval choreomania, and the stories of Carmen Maria Machado, crafting a world of bittersweet enchantment. But if her last record was a fairy tale, she told KROQ, “This one’s just a horror film.”
During the songwriting process, she steeped herself in the horror canon, studying occultism at the Warburg Institute and reading books such as Rob Young’s “Electric Eden,” which traces how British folk music in the sixties and seventies began to cross over with mysticism. “Doing the work and sleeping alone / downloading Revelations of Divine Love on my phone,” she sings wryly, on “Perfume and Milk.” There was an endearing camp to the rollout of “Everyone Scream,” which was released on Halloween: the teaser trailer, which was also directed by de Wilde, shows Welch yelling like a final girl into a deep hole. She even took screaming lessons to prepare. Welch has always brought musical-theatre instincts to her work, but these witchy references feel particularly well suited to an album that charts the sacrifices that she has made to have her work taken seriously. “Here I don’t have to be quiet / Here I don’t have to be kind, extraordinary, normal all at the same time,” Welch sings, of the power she finds while performing, on “Everybody Scream.” “But look at me run myself ragged, blood on the stage / But how can I leave you when you’re screaming my name?”
On “One of the Greats,” which Welch wrote while touring “Dance Fever,” we find the artist recovering from the sort of electric performance described in the opening track. She imagines herself buried underground and then raised back to life to keep making music. It may be one of Welch’s best songs in years—the kind of glorious slow burn on which she made her name. She recorded it in a single, six-minute take, with Mark Bowen, of the band Idles; during production, Ethel Cain added backing vocals. (Welch’s other collaborators on the album include Mitski and Aaron Dessner, of the National.) She sings about being burnt out, at only thirty-six:
