Admittedly, Welch making a work that fully embraces the gothic undertones of her previous outputs might seem like it would run the risk of self-parody. Everybody Scream’s release date being Halloween somewhat gives that impression, as does the opening title track, where Welch drapes her come-ons to dance, sing, scream, and move with a psychedelic organ, a propulsive drum beat, and a choral yelping straight out of Midsommar. What slightly subverts this expectation is Welch’s uber-confidence as a performer and genuine curiosity around exploring the album’s theme of madness, specifically how the act of screaming can be a natural, even healing reaction to the insanity of our world and the violence inflicted upon us. Her personal connection to this theme—she examined the history of witchcraft after experiencing an ectopic miscarriage on tour and a subsequent life-saving surgery—gives the emotional undercurrents of this project even more urgency and weight.
While the album primarily concerns Welch’s fraught psyche and rage, Everybody Scream is far from a solo-minded endeavor. It benefits from being Welch’s most collaborative, extroverted effort to date, as she enlisted the help of indie-rock darling Mitski, the National’s Aaron Dessner, hyperpop producer Danny L. Harle, and IDLES guitarist Mark Bowen. There’s sometimes a vague sense of “too many cooks in the kitchen” when listening to the album, but the strong pedigree of each musician allows Welch and her band greater flexibility to play around with their form.
Their best contributions come within the first few tracks, where Welch’s musings are most striking. “One of the Greats” carries with it a captivating narrative about Welch’s perspective on the gendered nature of power, wherein she indicts the rigidity of our culture’s sexist double standards (“It must be nice to be a man and make boring music just because you can”) and how men and women wield it differently (“It’s funny how men don’t find power very sexy / So this one’s for the ladies”). The words spill out of Welch like one raw stream-of-consciousness rant that bears a righteous, confrontational fury. It’s no wonder the song was recorded in one take but took three years to produce.
The immediate standout “Witch Dance” surprises and delights with its gripping vocal breathing, saucy Kill Bill-esque bass, and a rapturous slowed-down beat switch-up, contracting and expanding like an adrenaline-spiked heart muscle. “Sympathy Magic” is also quite good, the pounding pump of its drums and operatic swell of its strings accentuating Welch’s stirring observations about the “vague humiliations of fame” and her desire to rid herself of her pain by being taken out of her body. On “Kraken,” Welch’s wish gets granted as she imagines herself transforming into the titular mythical sea monster, her embrace of this new body buoyed by a rollicking, ecstatic instrumental.
Despite the album mostly getting by through the purity and vigor of its spirit, not every idea or lyric lands, particularly in the tracklist’s more uneven second half. There are moments on Everybody Scream, thankfully fleeting but still noticeable, where the modern and medieval sensibilities clash a bit and threaten to throw the album off its initially steady, clear-eyed axis. The gaudy, stadium-sized synths that emerge towards the end of “Sympathy Magic,” for instance, slightly deflate its buildup, turning a genuinely rousing song into an overwrought Coldplay-lite anthem. “Music by Men” is a more tonally wonky counterpart to “One of the Greats,” its contemporary references to couples therapy and listening to the 1975 bumping up against its rustic Western-like acoustic guitar riffs. “The Old Religion” and “And Love” are unmistakable Dessner productions with their solemn, minor-key piano riffs; the former is a bit too gloomy to fully resonate, but the latter is bolstered by some really pretty synths and harp strings, ending the album on a strong note as the closer.
Even in Everybody Scream’s unwieldiness and inconsistencies, Florence Welch’s reclamation of witchcraft as a vital practice for anyone struggling to cope with loss and trauma makes for a mostly satisfying and compelling listen. It’s also just nice to hear her continue to loosen up as an artist and expand her creative range into edgier, more caustic territory. Her music has frequently been a lot of sound and fury, but more often than not, it does signify something: in times of agony and moments of intense emotional strife, sometimes the best thing to do to feel some kind of release is shriek and wail, in the hopes that someone, anyone, might hear and join in.
Sam Rosenberg is a filmmaker and freelance entertainment writer from Los Angeles with bylines in The Daily Beast, Consequence, AltPress and Metacritic. You can find him on Twitter @samiamrosenberg.
