Florence + The Machine Releases New Album “Everybody Scream”
British alt-rock band Florence + The Machine, consisting of Florence Welch (vocals), Isabella Summers (keyboards), Robert Ackroyd (guitar), Tom Monger (harp), Cyrus Bayandor (bass), Aku Orraca-Tetteh (percussion), Dionne Douglas (violin) and Loren Humphrey (drums), released their sixth studio album “Everybody Scream” on October 31, 2025.
This marks their first album in three years since the 2022 album “Dance Fever”.
The album comprises 12 tracks (Chamber Version 16 tracks), which the band worked with British post-punk band IDLES' Mark Bowen, American singer-songwriter Mitski, and American rock band The National's Aaron Dessner over the past two years.
The album was inspired by the band lead singer Florence Welch's lifesaving surgery during the Dance Fever Tour in 2023, which led her to explore spiritual mysticism, folk horror, womanhood, partnership, aging, and dying.
Florence Welch told Zane Lowe of Apple Music about the album, “I actually ended up having a ectopic miscarriage onstage that was dangerous, and that I had to be hospitalized for, and I had to have immediate surgery because I had a Coke can of blood in my abdomen. I felt so out of control of my body, it was interesting. I looked into themes of witchcraft, and mysticism, and everywhere that you looked in terms of birth or stories of birth, you came across stories of witchcraft, and folk horror, and myths.”
She added, “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.”
Also, she said of the album in interview with KROQ, “I actually took so much inspiration from folk horror and horror movies, and the last album was based on this dark fairy tale mythology, so this one’s just a horror film. 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 lot of little bits of nature threaded through it, so it felt like the perfect moment to release it.”
She said of collaborator Mitski on BBC Radio 1, “I kind of had one of my dream artists. It came true on this record, like I got to collaborate with Mitski. And I didn't expect that to happen. I didn't know if she wrote on other people's records, and she was in town doing festivals, was like, 'Do you want to come to the studio and just see what I'm doing, and do you want to, like, write a song together?' Every time she puts out a song, I think it's the best song.”
She continued, “So I was listening to 'Bug Like an Angel'. I think when I was thinking about this record and she came to the studio. Was just the most amazing collaborator, like, the best kind of collaborator you can ask for where she's like, was up for writing songs together, but also just up for, like, problem solving with other songs, like with 'Everybody Scream'. That song didn't become what it was until she came to the studio and heard it and was like, I think you need a chorus.”
Florence Welch explained track by track for the alum.
“Everybody Scream” “The first thing I had for it was just the title, because I knew I wanted to write a song that rhymed with France and the machine. Really. Do you know what I haven't done yet in my career? I haven't made a song that rhymes with my name, so I need to do that. And there was also, like, a playlist that came off my phone that was called songs to scream along to. I was like, 'What does that mean?' Put this pale as sort of your scream into a pillow. So I was thinking about, like, everybody scream, and like, how much bravado there is in that, and inverting it into something that just meant.
And I kind of wanted to invert it into something different, but there were no words. There was just like, commands. And it was like, everybody do this, everybody do that. And Mitski came to the studio and we discussed what the song was about, and she sort of said, 'I think it's about your intimacy to the stage that I also have.' And the connection and the song kind of evolved from there. But it took like, because I wrote it with Bowen, who's in the band IDLES. He was always on tour. I was always on tour. And so the song, just like, got put together in pieces over a year.”
“One of the Greats” “I don’t really know how to explain myself with this one, it was sort of a long poem about the cost of greatness. Who gets to decide what that is? Why do I even want it? Why am I never satisfied? 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. Early in my career, I was consistently ridiculed and derided for the bigness of my expression. I was thrust into the spotlight but also told again and again I didn’t deserve it, or that because it wasn’t to their taste it wasn’t good. So maybe this is a 15-year outpouring of frustration. But also, a lot of the lines I just left in because I thought they were funny. Me and Bowen from IDLES wrote it in one take. He played the guitar and I just sang it straight from the page. We meant to re-record it but the first take just had this amazing energy. Then Aaron Dessner helped us take it to a truly transcendent place. I wanted it to feel like you were disintegrating into nothing at the end. Which is sometimes what the creative process feels to me. Death and resurrection over and over.”
“Witch Dance” “There’s a song called ‘Witch Dance’ which was sort of about grief rituals and so there is a practice of keening in Ireland and basically it’s like a sound of grief. It’s like a howl but it’s sort of like like keening. That one was about sort of different grief rituals um and things to try and commemorate loss, but I love the word keening.”
“Sympathy Magic” via Radio X “Sympathetic magic is this sort of magic that is supposed to connect you to another person. So, the idea of sympathetic magic is like you say something while you’re baking bread and it like then you give it to the person. It’s about making a connection. But I misheard it or misread it so, I was like, ‘Oh, sympathy magic,’ but actually that like that sort of feels better, I think that that’s what songs are if they have a magic is about making a connection with someone. So it was sort of the magic of connection and what that can do when you’ve been through something. [‘Witch Dance’ and ‘Sympathy Magic’] are [a pair] and they were kind of designed like that like. I wrote ‘Sympathy Magic’ with Danny L Harle and so I wanted to feel like those electronic textures were in ‘Witch Dance’ and I guess in the story, the story of ‘Witch Dance’ is the journey and it takes you to this place and ‘Sympathy Magic’ is almost the aftermath of that experience. I mean, Danny is in the dance world massively, but also like loves baroque and medieval music, so it was perfect and he’s kind of an expert in those as well. And it was sort of the first time like Danny came to the studio like I told him about the record, I had played him some of the stuff that I was working on and you know usually it was sort of the first time that then someone went away and then I came to like Danny’s studio and he’s like, ‘I’ve got this to play you,’ and, just from the other from the themes and from the other sonics, basically had the instrumental for ‘Sympathy Magic’ which is not usually like how I do it. It’s usually much more like in the room together but it blew me away immediately, and then I sort of like pieced, just sort of put the lyrics over it, but it already just had this incredible imagery to me like through the musi, and then I sort of spent some time bringing it kind of into a live world as well and like adding organic elements. The scream at the end is because I’m hitting a drum so hard that it actually hurt at the end, because there was, you know, um Danny was using mostly electronic drums. I was like, ‘Okay, we need like live drums on this. We need live piano,’ so I was adding things on top and actually I think I hit was hitting the drums so hard that I broke the stick.”
“Perfume and Milk” via Apple Music That song was actually the furthest from the event. That was, I think, two years from like when it happened. And so it was like it like processing. It was about healing and like having watched seasons change and having watched other things and then returning to the earth and a sense that I was also part of that nature and part of that cycle. It was a real song about like healing wasn’t linear as I was trying to tie up the album, a lot of the feelings would suddenly random come back, I’d get randomly completely terrified again or I would get like or I would just suddenly be like, ‘It’s happening again. It’s happening again. It’s happening,’ like I would get suddenly like completely terrified. So, it was sort of like looking as like healing is slow. It comes and it goes like and I was like, ‘Oh, like it really it is slow a process.’ And you know, sometimes something would trip me up and I would feel like I was just like back in that terror. This record I really just got so much like healing I think just from being in nature and obviously Aaron’s studio is in Hudson Valley, in upstate New York ,which is like sur and I stayed in a little house. It was very like the witch at the edge of the woods. Like I stayed in a little house on the edge of town and I like finished the record with Aaron and it was a sense that like I was having to kind of look at how I’d heal, look at the songs that I started the record with, look at how it was going to end and like yeah like piece myself together, you know? And I wanted to put in lots of natural flora and fauna on this record from like um we looked in to a lot of like um folk songs as well because there’s that amazing period of 70’s folk where they’re all like into the occult, you know, like Judee Sill and there’s an amazing book called Electric Eden which is like how when like folk and mysticism all started crossing over and so we were looking a lot of that at that period of time as well. And yeah, I was just like exploring all these different themes. But yeah, that song kind of came out of like those kind of things.
“Buckle” via Absolute Radio “Me and Mitski wrote that one and I just watched her sit there and just play it end to end on the guitar and I was like, ‘Well, that’s a song you can’t touch.’ I tried adding more production to that song, I tried adding synths, there was a world where it could’ve become more of a pop song but there was something about the quality with which, she’s one of my favorite musicians and songwriters, and there was something about the quality with which she played it, I was like, ‘I want that front and center.’”
“Kraken” via Radio X
“It was really fun working on this one with Dave and I really wanted it to have the sense when the kind of arse kicking that there was like a kraken sort of like blasting through the hull of a ship. It was sort of about my early, very, very early experiences on the indie scene and like kind of how dismissed you are as a young woman and no one takes you seriously and you’re just the kind of like drunk groupie. It was a sort of groupie’s revenge song, I guess, ‘cause I was a groupie. I was just always going to see like South London bands and and I think it’s sort of a sense of like you don’t it was so male, you know, back then and so you were so dismissed. And so I wanted it, that whole period of time felt like this like crazy pirate ship that we were all on, so, I wanted it to have this feeling of like creaking floorboards and like something coming from the water to get you. I guess it was like almost I think if you’d known me from that scene, it would have been like 'least likely to,’ just such a wild mess, like so drunk, so crazy. And then it’s like, ‘Oh, do you see me now?’ I wanted it to like embody feminine fury as well and I kind of imagined it as like thousands of young women just like screaming.”
“The Old Religion” via Radio X
“I was thinking a lot about the sort of 90s witchcraft and vampire films. I was so and like so obsessed with. I was thinking about The Craft and I was thinking about Buffy the Vampires Slayer and I was like almost trying to write a song that would have fit really well in those shows, you know, because they had such a big impact on me as a as a kid. But also I was thinking about like addiction itself and like just the desire to be out of the body and like I am wound really tightly, like I am really anxious and so I think there’s always something really furious in me that wants to get out, so it was almost thinking about like mysticism but also themes of like addiction and things like that. So this was in Hudson Valley with Aaron, and we’d been thinking about the record and like what it would need at this point and and it need, you know, after ‘Kraken,’ it needs like this propulsive energy and there was um there was a lot of the themes of like gothic romance as well throughout the record and I really wanted to make something that sounded like that, like running through a kind of haunted forest or something.”
“Drink Deep” via Radio X
“So, it was sort of going I was pulling on the old, very old sort of English and Irish old folk tales where fairies were actually far more vampiric in nature and actually very frightening creatures, and I was thinking about that and in some ways how it relates also to fame and performance and I guess touring is a sense that you are away with the fairies. You know, you disappear off into this other land and you come back and people are getting married, having children, like getting older, like moving and you’re sort of like, ‘Oh my god, I’ve been dancing for too long? Did I miss my life?’ And I think it was sort of as I was writing, I basically wanted to write a straight up like folk horror tale with this one, but sort of as I was writing it, I was like, ‘Oh, am I also like thinking about performance itself?’ And I think that a big thread on this record is sort of like the sacrifices of ambition and performance and what that takes from you and what it gives to you and the wrestle of that. It’s like you find out it’s taking from you and it’s taking all your life force and you just keep going. You’re like, ‘Yeah, I’ll go back.’”
“Music By Men” via Radio X
“‘Music by Men’ is almost about the reality of trying to make something work and that actually might be what real love is and actually how afraid of that I am. And the end line of ‘Music by Men’ is like running back to the only love I could control, which is performance, which is the stage, you know? So people who are absent allow you to just be with your fantasies. But there’s a part of me that’s like, ‘No, I want the real things too,’ but it’s work.. […] Sometimes I think that if I was male, would I feel somehow ashamed of my success? Do you know what I mean? Like there’s a sense that the things that I have created are somehow, in other ways, that if I was a man they would be attractive to people are somehow things that I have to sort of hide or shrink from. You know what I mean? To sort of like apologize for, that’s the sense that I have, to like apologize for being so big, and try to shrink my achievements in some way to make people feel comfortable. I do sometimes wonder if like my success is actually a barrier to personal happiness in a way that maybe I don’t like and because I’m living a kind of like non traditional role is that somehow like robbing me of other things like having a family, like having things like that. I think actually my gender has kind of been like thrust upon me. It’s not really something I like identify with wholly. I actually felt like performance and art and liberated me from my gender and I just think it has in terms of then when I was just thinking about trying to have a family, it just kind of came to get me. It’s like something that has been put upon me, but then also suddenly it was like it caught me or something. Only just ‘cause I did want those things, I do want to have a family. So beyond the themes of gender, the theme is what being an artist is. And actually sometimes the monstrousness of it, the monstrousness of two artists being together, you know, just like the sense that the song always wins, the work always wins, the kind of the devotion to it. Like 'Why are you so devoted to it above all things?’ And I keep choosing it, you know. So, I think there are themes of gender, but I think within that is also the feeling of being an artist where you constantly keep giving every part of yourself to this beast, you know, that is your work. Because it just demands more and more and more and album cycles are getting shorter like I finished this one and they’re like, ‘Amazing. When can we expect the next?’ I was like, ‘This feels like this is like the fastest I ever did it.’ I mean I feel like it’s that it’s like really seeing under the hood in lots of ways. Beyond also gender it is just about what committing yourself to being an artist sort of entails and the sacrifices of it and the sort of brutality of it. Can they survive with this creature in the house? The creature that like is your work and will it destroy everything? You know, and I think that’s like every time I release an album, I’m like, ‘Please don’t destroy everything,’ like, ‘Please let me have a relationship at the end of this,’ you know? It is that thing. You feel like you unleash something onto the world and just hope the rest of your personal life survives.”
“You Can Have It All” via Radio X
“That is a like a ‘fuck you’ to that phrase. That is an absolute ‘fuck you’ to that phrase. It was this phrase that was sort of told to women like, ‘You can have it all,’ like the career, the family but actually that was still working within structures that sort of weren’t built for you. So you just had to do double and always feeling like you were failing on some level, so I think it was just sort of like an outpouring of rage at that phrase, I think. But maybe it’ll turn. Sometimes songs do turn and they change their meaning and I hope this one’s meaning will change. But right now, no, it’s just mad. I think it doesn’t acknowledge the cost and also, in trying to have it all, how many women feel like they’re just stretched so thin, you know, so thin and so exhausted and always feel guilty.”
“And Love” via Apple Music
“‘And Love’ was like, when I wrote that song I was like ‘okay, so if the songs have this terrible prescience, if they have this power, if they are spells or manifestations or prayers, let this one be the one that comes true. Let this one be the one that is realized in the world, not just for myself but for everyone. After an album that’s so full of desire and fury and ache, I think the world “scream” is every song in some capacity, it’s there threaded through in so many ways, that I wanted to end it on this sense of peace and resting and getting to breathe out. There’s so much primal sort of panting energy in some of the songs and I wanted this one to just sound like a breath out in the end.”
