Florence + The Machine’s ‘Everybody Scream’ Puts Mortality at the Centre

Florence + The Machine’s sixth album, ‘Everybody Scream’, has given the project a fourth Mercury Prize shortlist nomination, drawing Florence Welch level with Laura Marling, PJ Harvey, Pulp and Wolf Alice on the prize’s all-time tally. Released on Halloween, the record carries that date’s atmosphere into its subject matter rather than its packaging.

Mortality runs through it. Welch had life-saving surgery in 2023 following an ectopic pregnancy, and was back onstage ten days later. ‘Everybody Scream’ works from that vantage point, though rarely in plain terms. The title track sets the register, a sinister reworking of Tame Impala’s ‘Elephant’ with a harp buried inside it, while ‘Perfume And Milk’ and the sprawling ‘You Can Have It All’ hold the tension elsewhere. ‘One Of The Greats’ and ‘Music By Men’, which name-drops The 1975, pull the album’s concerns about fame and scrutiny closer to the surface, against lyrics that circle celebrity, femininity, and the intersection of the physical, the mental and the supernatural.

The cycle closed at Reading & Leeds, where Welch topped the bill for the first time, appearing at the summit of the stage in heavy rain as the title track opened. She had headlined Glastonbury a decade earlier, and the distance between those two performances, across ‘How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful’ and ‘Dance Fever’, is part of what the record documents.