Florence + The Machine – Everybody Scream (Universal) (13th Floor Album Review)
With Everybody Scream, Florence Welch doesn’t simply release a new album; she casts a spell.
The record feels less like a follow-up to Dance Fever and more like its spiritual resurrection, picking up right where Morning Elvis left off. The sound of the cheering crowd from that final track bleeds directly into this one’s opener, Everybody Scream, as if the curtain rises again on the same stage. This time, Welch isn’t pleading for salvation; she is commanding it.
Where Dance Fever celebrated movement and ritual, Everybody Scream is about release. It is raw, punk, and ritualistic, a battle cry for catharsis. Welch sounds reborn yet more haunted than ever, a priestess of chaos channeling fury and grace through distortion and chant. The title track wastes no time reestablishing Florence’s dominion. Over snarling guitars and a growling bassline, she taunts and embraces her audience: Aren’t you so glad you came? / Breathless and begging and screaming my name. It is theatrical, vengeful, and self-aware, a rock anthem that knows its own mythology. One of the greats, she proclaims mid-song, half in jest, half in prophecy.
Witch Dance plunges straight into Florence’s most primal instincts. The track feels like a spell, full of hand drums, rhythmic breathing, and ghostly background chants. It bridges the sacred and the earthly, dragging modern imagery such as pubs, New York, and Broadway into the realm of the occult. The result is hypnotic, a modern pagan dance floor where chaos and divinity coexist. Sympathy Magic (or as I’d like to call it, “synthony magic”) lives up to its name. It is ethereal and synth-heavy, one of the album’s most transcendent pieces. Around the midpoint, her signature falsetto pierces through the soundscape as the tempo shifts and the song erupts into a euphoric electronic bloom. It is pure escapism, a sprint through an open field under stormy skies.
Not every scream is loud. Buckle pares the chaos back to a simple acoustic arrangement, evoking the intimacy of Florence’s earliest work. It is a portrait of unrequited love and emotional paralysis as she admits, I made a thousand people love me and I’m all alone. It is devastating in its restraint, a moment of quiet amid the tempest. If The Old Religion is the sermon, Drink Deep is the war hymn. The former swells with cinematic percussion and long, drawn-out vocals that feel like a summoning. The latter dives into heavy bass and throat-sung chants, a sound that feels almost tribal in its gravity. Together they anchor the album’s middle section in ritual and rebirth, the twin forces of devotion and destruction.
The closer, And Love, exhales where the rest of the album howls. It is delicate and luminous, offering a rare softness: Peace is coming, she promises. After forty-five minutes of feral beauty and ecstatic noise, it lands like a sunrise after the ritual, a reminder that even the fiercest scream fades into silence.
Everybody Scream is not a carefully curated collection of songs. It is a visceral purge, a spiritual continuation of Dance Fever’s mythology. Welch summons her fans once again into a gothic cathedral of sound where punk, pop, and neofolk converge. The result is an album that feels alive, breathing, and thrumming with the electricity of performance.
This is not just Florence Welch returning to the stage; it is her reclaiming it, commanding the world to dance, sing, and, most of all, scream.
Azrie Azizi
Everybody Scream is due out on Friday, Oct 31 via Universal Music
