By Abigail Holliday
Copy Editor
Florence + The Machine have just released their newest album “Everybody Scream” on Oct. 31.
Florence + The Machine are a British indie rock band, led by lead singer Florence Welch, also including Isabella Summers and more that fuel “The Machine.”
The band was formed in 2007, but didn’t take off until 2009 with their debut album “Lungs.” This album received a Critics Choice Award, charted No. 1 on the UK Albums Chart in 2010 and remained in the top 40 for 65 weeks declaring it one of 2009/2010’s best selling albums and leading them to win the British Album of the Year award in 2010, according to IMDb. Their most popular song from this album is “Dog Days Are Over” with over 1 billion streams on Spotify alone.
Since then, the band has now reached 1 million followers on Instagram, 28 million monthly listeners on Spotify and received seven Grammy nominations. Additionally, four of their past five albums have all topped the UK charts, “Lungs” (2009), “Ceremonials” (2011), “How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful” (2015) and their last album “Dance Fever” (2022).
“Dance Fever” was inspired by the 16th century marvel where people danced themselves to death. While on their last month of the “Dance Fever” tour in 2023, Welch suffered a severe, life-threatening ectopic miscarriage onstage. This life-altering event is what inspired “Everybody Scream,” according to NPR.
“Everybody Scream” is a 12-song album with help from Mitski, Aaron Dessner and IDLES guitarist Mark Bowen, their latest album in over three years.
In an interview with NPR, Welch credits her new album as a tribute to feeling like herself again after such a traumatic experience, “...I think part of putting this record together and doing a tour is because it is the place that I feel the most myself.”
Just in time for Halloween, “Everybody Scream” takes heavily from mythology and folk tales, with Welch calling this album a “horror film” compared to her past albums. She was influenced by “Lolly Willowes,” a novel by Sylvia Townsend Warner about a woman who defects from social norms to partake in witchcraft, “The Bell Jar” by Sylvia Plath about a woman going insane due to the expectations of women in the 1950s, the horror film “It Follows” and more.
Welch said, “It kind of wrestles with life and death and darker themes, but there’s a lot of nature in it as well. It’s a very seasonal record, it feels very autumnal to me. There’s lots of little bits of nature threaded through it, so it felt like the perfect moment to release it.”
The song “Everybody Scream” follows Welch’s expectations as an entertainer, driven to exhaustion from the constant performing but addicted to the way the fans praise her, she wails, “But look at me run myself ragged / Blood on the stage / But how can I leave you when you're screaming my name?”
Similarly, in her song, “One of the Greats,” she croons, “I crawled up from under the earth / Broken nails and coughin’ dirt / Spittin’ out my songs so you could sing along, oh…” This beautiful song reflects not only her brush with death on her last tour, but her constant frustration towards the industry.
In a press release, Welch stated, “I feel like I die a little bit every time I make a record, and kind of literally nearly died on the last tour. Yet I always dig myself up to try again, always trying to please that one person who doesn’t like it, or finally feel like I made something perfect and I can rest.”
This album is filled with screams from “Witch Dance,” chants and belts from “Kraken,” breathing and panting from “Everybody Scream” and just the overall pouring out of emotions in a very spiritual way. Fans of “Dog Days Are Over” are definitely going to love her new song “Sympathy Magic,” as the two mirror each other in the way the music crescendos into this beautiful release of emotion.
Welch told Apple Music in an interview, “There was basically an urgency to this record. It came out of me in this furious burst 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.”
