(Polydor)
On her self-deprecating, viscera-flecked sixth record, Florence Welch picks apart the compulsions and contradictions of fame
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?”
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”.
