You Make Me Think My Therapy is a Waste of Money: Florence + The Machine’s Everybody Scream

"I think the sound that came out of me was like a wounded animal or something," said Florence Welch, frontwoman of  Florence + The Machine, describing the aftermath of a near-death experience and the subsequent medical procedure that saved her life. While touring her last album, Dance Fever (2022), Welch suffered an ectopic pregnancy, but continued to perform, the pain seemingly disappearing—like magic—while she was on stage. Soon, however, the pain returned, and Welch was rushed into emergency surgery while still on tour. Welch returned to the stage just ten days later to finish out the tour. On Florence + The Machine’s latest release Everybody Scream (2025), Welch searches for sources of healing and strength while dealing with the demands of making a record, but must confront her anxieties and self-destructive behaviors in the process. 

The album opens with the title track “Everybody Scream,” an electric and commanding tour de force which serves as a talisman channeling her fury and grief.  Speaking to L'Officiel, Welch describes the wake of her miscarriage as a time when she “really needed that energy. I needed to scream because when it happens to you, you are silent. You can’t scream.” Welch’s signature vibrato ingrains itself seamlessly into war-like drums and scream-like basslines provided by Mark Bowen of IDLES, who, along with Aaron Dessner of The National, helped produce the majority of the album. This discordant sound explodes across the album, unleashed by the “witch choir” who end the title track with an incantation, forming an aesthetic and thematic grimoire for the entire album: “The witchcraft, the medicine, the spells and the injections / The harvest, the needle protect me from evil / The magic and the misery, madness and the mystery / Oh, what has it done to me? Everybody scream.” 

On “One of the Greats,” a sweeping, nearly seven-minute, single-take track, Welch, almost prophetically, exclaims, “Arms outstretched, back from the dead.” Written before her near-death experience, Welch asks of her creative process, “burned out at thirty-six, why did you dig me up for this?” For Welch, creating does not come without cost. She wrote in a press release accompanying the single, “I feel like I die a little bit every time I make a record…Yet I always dig myself up to try again, always trying to please that one person who doesn’t like it.” Later in the album, on the track “Music by Men,” Welch expresses frustration with the lengths she has to go to in order to feel successful.: “Breaking my bones, getting four out five /…I might as well give music by men a try.” Like the biblical tale of Jacob wrestling a blessing out of an angel, Welch wrestles with her relationship to a monstrous, bloodthirsty personification of her creative process. This process deconstructs her life in pursuit of inspiration for the next album. She must sacrifice her sanity and physical health to satiate the monster and receive its boon. 

Image Credit: Genius

Throughout the rest of the album, Welch repeatedly confronts her relationships with her process and with others . On the track “The Old Religion,” she notes “some animal instinct starting up again,” a mythologized version of anxiety which produces a desire for self-destructive violence in response to powerlessness and the stolidness of healing. On “Witch Dance,” she considers the power of desire. As she mentioned in an interview with the Guardian, “The closest I came to making life was the closest I came to death.” Welch conjures sex in gothic fashion, tearing off her nightgown and giving in to “the ache, the kick, the need” of “ruinous desire” which draws her into a deeper connection with her femininity and the monster of album creation. Looking for consolation, she appeals to her ancestors for advice. When they reveal themselves to be clueless about the path she should follow, the power of divination rests solely with Welch.. In the song’s outro, Welch recounts her encounters with “every monster from the bar to Broadway” but ultimately refuses their offers of fame and fortune because “no one is more monstrous than me.” The song ends with the wailing of the reconvened witch choir coven, Welch at her full power over a shimmering harp. 

The album’s title and the second verse of the title track are pulled from a poem Welch shared on Instagram in 2019 titled “Social Medea,” referencing an ancient Greek sorceress of medicinal healing, Medea. Welch describes her journey to healing from (insert) in the song “Perfume and Milk,” writing, “Licking my wounds, burrowing down/ In a house in the woods on the edge of town / Well, healing is slow, it comes and it goes.” Finding solace in herbs and the changing seasons, Welch proclaims “all shall be well”. Finding herself immersed in the cycle of life and death, Welch reminds the listener, and herself, that healing takes time. A similar message closes out the album, where soft harp replaces the noise of the title track. On “And Love,” Welch surrenders to a newfound reality, not mythologized, not begging for sacrifice, not “a romance novel heroine being swept away.” She leaves listeners with the invocation: “peace is coming.”

Favorite tracks:

3. “Witch Dance”

6. “Buckle”

12. “And Love”

Rating: INDY

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Chandler Paulk is a sophomore in the College studying history & English. He touched Florence Welch’s hand once; it healed him.