“There was basically an urgency to this record. It came out of me in this furious burst,” Florence Welch tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe of Florence + the Machine’s sixth full-length. “And it’s one of those records where if I hadn’t have put it out now, it never would’ve come out because I think how I felt about things is so specific to this moment in time, and this roared out of me. It was made almost like a coping mechanism.”
That moment in time began for Welch during the <i>Dance Fever</i> tour. “I actually ended up having a ectopic miscarriage onstage that was dangerous, and that I had to be hospitalized for, and I had to have immediate surgery because I had a Coke can of blood in my abdomen,” she explains. Her health crisis and ensuing feelings fueled <i>Everybody Scream</i>, which offers a haunting yet cathartic experience for both the singer and those listening. “I felt so out of control of my body, it was interesting,” she says. “I looked into themes of witchcraft, and mysticism, and everywhere that you looked in terms of birth or stories of birth, you came across stories of witchcraft, and folk horror, and myths.”
Infusing those elements throughout the album, Welch wails, warbles, belts—and, yes, screams—with emotional clarity and appropriately witchy charisma while getting quality assistance in the form of Mitski, Aaron Dessner, and IDLES guitarist Mark Bowen. The title track muses on fame and pushing through the pain to perform: “But look at me run myself ragged/Blood on the stage/But how can I leave you when you’re screaming my name?” Conjuring up a bacchanalian forest rave, “Witch Dance” casts a spell with its heated pace and Welch’s breathy chants. And for the singer, “Perfume and Milk” helps alleviate her own agony. “It was about healing and having watched seasons change and having watched other things growing and then returning to the earth and a sense that I was also part of that nature and part of that cycle,” she says.
<i>Everybody Scream</i> ends with the stirring “And Love,” striking a hopeful note: “Peace is coming” she repeats on the ballad. “Let this one be the one that comes true,” she says. “Let this one be the one that is realized in the world. I think the songs are always three steps ahead of me. It’s been that way my whole life.”
