The title track of Everybody Scream provides a suitably striking opening for Florence + the Machine’s sixth album. A sinister organ and a choir of voices harmonise in the style of a horror theme, replaced in short order by the sound of screaming and a stomping glam rock rhythm; instead of the shouts of “Hey!” that traditionally punctuated a glitterbeat in the 70s, there are distaff cries of “Dance!” and “Turn!” Its sound offers a corrective to the notion that whenever the National’s Aaron Dessner appears as co-producer in an album’s credits, as he does here, it means the artist in question is striving for tastefully hued indie folk – the sound he brought to Taylor Swift’s 2020 albums Folklore and Evermore, Ed Sheeran’s Autumn Variations and the mistier moments of Gracie Abrams’ The Secret of Us. It also provides a backdrop over which Florence Welch can ruminate on what sounds like a very complicated relationship with fame. She says she can only become her “full size” on stage and openly relishes the control she can exert over an audience, “breathless and begging and screaming”. Equally, there appears to be a downside. “Look at me run myself ragged, blood on the stage,” she sings. “But how can I leave when you’re calling my name?”
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Amid the stuff about paganism, witchcraft and the references to 14th-century mystic Julian of Norwich, this appears to be the central theme of Everybody Scream: the push and pull of fame, a compulsive desire to perform that overwhelms everything in ways that seem unhealthy. It crops up again and again, sometimes in visceral terms linked to the grim events of 2023, when complications from a miscarried ectopic pregnancy left Welch needing emergency life-saving surgery mid-tour – “I crawled up from under the earth, broken nails and coughing dirt, spitting out my songs so you could sing along,” opens One of the Greats, over grumbling, Velvet Underground-ish guitar courtesy of Idles’ Mark Bowen – and sometimes with a winning kind of self-deprecating humour. Music by Men details a relationship in crisis, scorns Welch’s partner, then shifts the blame on to herself. The problem with life offstage, she notes ruefully, is that “there’s not much applause”.
It’s a relationship that Welch is well placed to examine. Seventeen years on from the release of her debut single, Kiss with a Fist, she could reasonably claim to be the most consistently successful British alt-rock artist of her era, with the possible exception of Arctic Monkeys. At least in terms of influence over modern pop, she dwarfs Alex Turner: being sampled by Kendrick Lamar and Drake; tapped as a collaborator by Taylor Swift and Lady Gaga; hailed as an inspiration by Beyoncé; and her sound clearly in the DNA of Ethel Cain, Chappell Roan and the Last Dinner Party. It’s a position from which Welch can look back at the equivocal critical response to her early work with a degree of I-knew-I-was-right relish: on One of the Greats, she blames her early lukewarm reviews on sexism. Responding to your critics in song is a fraught business – there’s a danger of coming up with something so indignant it makes the listener wonder if they may not have had a point – but One of the Greats does it with a smart, spiky humour that feels particularly effective given that a certain high seriousness about her wilfully OTT theatricality was among the criticisms laid at Welch’s door: “I’ll be up there with the men and the 10 other women in the hundred greatest records of all time / It must be nice to be a man and make boring music just because you can.”
Of course, wilfully OTT theatricality is what sold Welch so many albums in the first place and it’s here in spades. No one’s going to come away from Everybody Scream complaining about a paucity of big choruses and impassioned operatic vocal extemporisations. But there’s more light and shade here than you might expect, a greater desire to set the volume low than crank it up to 11: the crescendos of Drink Deep (ululating vocals) and You Can Have It All (pounding drums, discordant A Day in the Life strings) are more impactful because they’re separated by Music by Men, which sets Welch’s voice to nothing more than a strummed acoustic guitar and a very light sprinkling of piano, letting her undoubted melodic facility shine. Witch Dance and Sympathy Magic metaphorically throw the kitchen sink at you – the second reprises the thumping percussive approach of her debut album Lungs, but chucks in a huge rave-breakdown synth for good measure. They’re succeeded by Perfume and Milk, and Buckle, both relatively intimate and unadorned.
“All of my peers they had such potential … I kissed them goodbye and let them drown,” sings Welch on Kraken, a line that seems to reflect her unique position among her class of 2008 indie contemporaries. More rounded musically and emotionally than the caricature version of Florence + the Machine may lead you to expect, Everybody Scream is an album that suggests she’s wearing her hard-earned status rather well.