“The closest I got here to creating life was the closest I got here to demise,” Florence Welch instructed The Guardian final month. She was referencing a miscarriage that she skilled in August 2023, flush in the course of a European tour with Florence + the Machine; an ectopic being pregnant pressured Welch into emergency surgical procedure, which saved her life. “I felt like I had stepped by this door, and it was simply full of girls, screaming.” This fashioned the idea of All people Scream, Florence + the Machine’s newest effort.
For six albums and 15 years now, Welch has constructed her artistry on a form of ritual self-destruction: the barefoot sprinting throughout levels, the operatic wailing, the bodily and emotional exorcism that defines a Florence + the Machine efficiency. She broke her foot at Coachella in 2015, pushed by it, stored going. The emergency surgical procedure lastly pressured her to cease. And but, the brand new album born from the stillness of restoration is in regards to the irresistible pull again to the very factor that almost killed her. All people Scream isn’t simply Welch processing her trauma — it’s Welch realizing she won’t be capable to cease performing it.
That skinny line between life and demise additionally speaks to a bigger battle in Welch’s life and profession: the brink between her physique and its limits, the strain of being a lady and an artist in a world that frequently reductions each. On All people Scream, Welch interrogates herself with newfound specificity and better stakes, leading to a few of the most sincere epiphanies and sharpest writing of her profession. In an odd method, although, the album doesn’t current Florence + the Machine reborn. It nonetheless features as a ritual of bloodletting, a summoning, a determined quest for cathartic launch by operatic pressure and mythological imagery — the identical perform as each album earlier than it. What’s completely different is that Welch has turn into extra self-aware about this cycle.
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As an alternative of utilizing each track as a method to achieve a full-throated catharsis, she lets the phrases tumble out of her in a sheer outpouring of thought. The lyrics on All people Scream usually arrive in torrents, skating throughout syllables with barely a pause for breath. She’s all the time a line away from one thing slicing, devastating, evocative, or deeply revealing. Welch invokes unified imagery like grime, witches, timber, fruit, critters, wind, divine intervention, killing and crushing, and, most of all, screaming.
She does scream and howl, definitely on the title monitor, however this time, Welch opts for a extra understated method of expressing a carnal, teeming need for launch. The lyrics persistently construct in dramatic rigidity, exemplified by a couplet in “One of many Greats” the place Welch spits the phrases “You’ll bury me once more, you’ll say it’s all fake/ That I might by no means be nice being held up in opposition to such male tastes,” chewing on “such male” and letting her rhythm fall barely behind the beat for the sake of emphasis. She actually lets it rip a number of strains later, sneering “Now don’t get me fallacious, I’m a fan/ You’re my second favourite frontman.”
In a really thrilling method, Welch is unstoppable on All people Scream. She likens her physique to each alien and sea monster on “Kraken,” however relatively than body her expertise as that of somebody who is broken, she’s empowered by the sensation, conjuring a kraken’s astonishing energy with enveloping harmonies and a driving rhythm. “You Can Have It All” is a late album spotlight, Welch performing a seance with the album’s rolodex of witch-y imagery to gas an awe-striking ‘rise from the ashes’ second within the refrain. “Am I a lady, now?,” she asks with a wink after the track’s ultimate transformative climax.
Welch’s exploration of gender and the physique is one other method that she advances upon prior themes in her discography. A lot of All people Scream is a method for Welch to reframe the trauma round her being pregnant, miscarriage, and restoration from surgical procedure. The thought of formality and ceremony has been vital to Welch on prior albums (she actually put out a file referred to as Ceremonials), and this time, Welch makes use of efficiency (i.e. seances, spells, instructions) as a solution to discover an outsized, complicated portrayal of womanhood. She employs language of physique horror-esque transformation, possession, and rebirth; she rails in opposition to the trimmings of being seen by the general public as “too female to perform” and contrasts meditations on womanhood with unshakeable notes of violence, decay, and destruction. On her final album, Welch sang “I’m no mom, I’m no bride, I’m king.” Now, post-operation, physique ceaselessly modified, Welch can’t fairly work out what she is, which she appears to seek out each horrifying and empowering.
She reaches some unsettling epiphanies on “Drink Deep,” a slow-burning folk-horror reduce that appropriately brews and stews as Welch describes imbibing a potion she was given to drink. However on the track’s climax, she reveals that the drink got here from her all alongside. After an album spent processing what her physique endured (the being pregnant, the emergency surgical procedure, the pressured reckoning with bodily limits), “Drink Deep” means that she’s all the time been feeding on her personal destruction, that the catharsis she seeks requires her to constantly provide up items of herself.
She continues with this interrogation on the excellent “Music by Males,” a companion to “One of many Greats” in its unflinching exploration of her standing as a lady in music. Hardly ever has Welch written so overtly about her personal profession and doubts, referencing a lackluster expertise in {couples} counseling, the methods during which her job makes it not possible for her to keep up a relationship, and the contempt it leads her to develop for the lads in her life. There are about 14 strains you may simply classify as ‘completely brutal,’ however for its concluding bridge, Welch components the storm clouds to supply an vital plea: “Let me put out a file and have it not break my life.” That line, proper there, is the thesis for All people Scream: How can she presumably hold making artwork like this if it’s destroying her?
On closing monitor “And Love,” Welch assures us that “peace is coming,” however All people Scream has spent an excessive amount of time interrogating itself to let that promise land with out skepticism. That is, in any case, an album about somebody who practically died, recovered, and promptly made a file about eager to return to the stage — one thing Welch will definitely do, with an enormous 2026 tour already deliberate. All people Scream poses questions on whether or not being conscious of self-destructive patterns is sufficient to break them fully, and Welch leaves them principally unanswered. It’s additionally, total, a reprisal of the identical musicality that she’s employed all through her catalog.
However Welch has all the time been each the hurricane and its eye, able to summoning awe-striking pressure whereas observing it with crystalline readability. On All people Scream, she’s merely turned that gaze inward with uncompromising honesty. If she will be able to’t escape the ritual, no less than now she understands what it prices. And even when she’s nonetheless paying for it, it’s clear that the closest she’s come to demise has resulted in a few of her most important, illuminating work but.
