Florence Welch is singing from elsewhere now. Not the cathedral heights of Ceremonials or the sweating, euphoric climax of Dance Fever, however a quieter room. Stone partitions, perhaps. Candles as a substitute of chandeliers. The form of area the place you whisper prayers as a substitute of screaming them.
On 31 October 2025, she launched Everyone Scream, her sixth studio album containing twelve tracks, with a deluxe version increasing to sixteen.
The album arrived after a collection of singles that felt much less like promotional instruments and extra like dispatches from a non-public ritual: “Everyone Scream” in August, “One of many Greats” in September, “Sympathy Magic” in late October, and “Buckle” in early November.
But it surely’s the deeper album cuts that reveal the true structure of this period: the chamber model of “Outdated Faith”, “Music by Males”, and “Fragrance and Milk”.
None of them behave like standard pop songs. They don’t construct to explosive choruses. They don’t attain for radio.
As a substitute, they curl inward, dense with imagery that reads extra like folklore than pop music. Milk as ritual providing. Faith as ancestral inheritance. Music as harmful devotion. Water as each cleaning and drowning.
Followers have observed. This isn’t simply new music. It’s a shift in climate.
Florence Welch’s new period feels mythic however exhausted, like a priestess who’s been performing ceremonies for too lengthy and eventually sat all the way down to query what she’s been worshipping.
The album’s songs are slower, stranger, extra occupied with what occurs after the ritual ends than in the course of the peak of it. There’s much less theatre right here, and extra aftermath.
It’s value asking what modified. In August 2023, in the course of the Dance Fever tour, Florence skilled an ectopic being pregnant that ruptured her fallopian tube.
She carried out by way of it at a Cornwall pageant, bleeding internally, popping ibuprofen backstage. Emergency surgical procedure adopted. One fallopian tube gone.
A door opening, as she described it, “full of girls, screaming.” That rupture, each bodily and religious, is the bottom from which Everyone Scream grew.
Dance Fever was about our bodies in movement, ecstatic launch, the concern of stopping. Excessive As Hope was reckoning with sobriety and softness.
However Everyone Scream doesn’t transfer like both of these albums. It sits nonetheless. It watches. It remembers outdated tales and wonders in the event that they nonetheless apply. It asks what you owe to your artwork when your artwork almost killed you.
Florence has all the time written like somebody translating myths into trendy feeling, however now the interpretation feels extra deliberate. The symbols she’s utilizing aren’t ornamental.
They’re load-bearing. Milk isn’t simply an evocative picture in “Fragrance and Milk”; it carries meanings of motherhood, purity, sacrifice, nourishment withheld or provided.
“Outdated Faith” doesn’t simply reference the previous; it embodies a form of religious inheritance that feels each comforting and suffocating.
The symbolism defined throughout these tracks isn’t about fixing a puzzle. It’s about recognising patterns that repeat throughout centuries of storytelling.
Water retains showing, however not the way in which it did in earlier work. In Ceremonials, water was drowning, overwhelming, a pressure that swallowed you complete.
Right here, it’s quieter. Extra like standing in a river and feeling the present however selecting to not transfer. The hazard continues to be there, however so is the stillness. Florence’s hidden meanings usually reside in that pressure between motion and stasis, chaos and management.
The witch-poet factor of her writing has all the time been current, nevertheless it’s sharpened now. She’s not performing witchcraft as aesthetic; she’s documenting it as follow.
The songs really feel like they have been written in sequence with one thing else: lighting candles, drawing symbols, talking names aloud.
“Sympathy Magic”, the title itself, refers back to the folkloric precept that like produces like. A doll made in somebody’s picture can have an effect on the particular person. A music about longing can manifest longing. The act of singing turns into the spell.
Watch the official “Sympathy Magic” music video:
Mythology has threaded by way of Florence’s work from the start. “Shake It Out” referenced the canine days, a Roman perception concerning the hottest a part of summer season.
“What the Water Gave Me” borrowed from Virginia Woolf and Frida Kahlo in equal measure. However these songs used delusion as metaphor.
Florence and the machine’s 2025 materials makes use of it as construction. The songs don’t simply reference outdated tales; they behave like outdated tales, shifting with the logic of people tales the place repetition issues and symbols carry extra weight than plot.
“Music by Males” interrogates devotion in a manner that feels uncomfortably particular. It’s about loving one thing that doesn’t love you again, pouring your self into artwork or individuals or beliefs that take with out giving.
The title itself is a quiet accusation. Not rage, precisely. Extra like documentation. A document of what was given and what was taken. The music doesn’t resolve. It simply names the imbalance and lets it sit there.
“Outdated Faith”, particularly in its chamber model, strips away the drama of the unique recording and leaves one thing extra skeletal. You’ll be able to hear each breath.
The strings really feel funereal but additionally cautious, like they’re holding one thing fragile. The title refers to pre-Christian perception methods, however the music doesn’t romanticise them. It treats them as inheritance. One thing handed down that you just didn’t select however can’t fairly abandon both.
“Fragrance and Milk” is the strangest of the gathering. The imagery is home however unsettling. Milk as providing, as maternal obligation, as one thing that may spoil.
Fragrance as disguise, as seduction, because the factor that lingers after somebody leaves. The 2 photographs sit collectively uneasily, making a portrait of femininity that’s each nurturing and carried out, each instinctive and exhausting.
The emotional through-line throughout these songs is fatigue. Not burnout precisely, however a religious tiredness that comes from years of performing depth.
Dance Fever was concerning the concern of stopping. These songs are about what occurs once you do cease. When the ritual ends and also you’re alone with the candles and you must resolve when you imagine in any of it anymore.
There’s one thing virtually vampiric in how Florence describes the act of acting on tracks like “Drink Deep.” Not efficiency as transcendence, however as extraction.
One thing that siphons life pressure, takes items of you every time you step on stage. The ritual doesn’t simply exhaust you. It consumes you. And after almost dying, the query turns into sharper: what are you prepared to sacrifice? What do you owe?
The album charts a curious energy dynamic. In efficiency contexts, on songs just like the title observe and “Witch Dance,” Florence presents herself as highly effective, commanding, virtually supernatural.
However in relationship contexts, on “Buckle” and “Kraken,” she’s weakwilled, simply wooed, evaluating herself to an decoration hanging off somebody’s denims.
It’s the identical particular person, however the contexts reveal totally different variations. The lady who can command a stage turns into small within the face of flattery. The witch who screams turns into quiet in intimate rooms.
There’s a pressure between purity and chaos that runs by way of all of the Florence the Machine evaluation of this period.
The imagery is commonly clear: milk, white attire, stone altars, clear water. However the feelings are messy: grief that gained’t resolve, love that consumes, devotion that borders on self-destruction. The contradiction isn’t unintentional. It’s the purpose. Purity is a efficiency. Chaos is what’s beneath.
In comparison with earlier work, the emotional maturity right here is startling. Excessive As Hope was about studying to be softer.
That is about studying when softness isn’t sufficient. It’s about recognising that some patterns repeat as a result of they’re woven into the material of who you’re, not simply dangerous habits you may stop.
Sonically, all the pieces is quieter. Florence’s voice, which has all the time been a pressure of nature, sounds extra uncovered right here.
There’s much less reverb, fewer layers, much less armour. The chamber preparations on “Outdated Faith” make the music really feel prefer it’s being carried out in a small room moderately than a live performance corridor.
You’ll be able to hear the strings respiration. The area between notes issues as a lot because the notes themselves.
However quiet doesn’t imply secure. On “Sympathy Magic”, Florence delivers one thing borderline unhinged.
The virtuosity is there, the facility, the amount, the presence. However she sounds determined. Out of her thoughts.
The woody percussion timbres, the scattered orchestral thrives, the stomping that appears like ritual, all of it helps a vocal efficiency that’s barely contained.
It’s the sound of somebody who’s stopped enjoying it secure as a result of enjoying it secure didn’t defend her from hurt anyway.
Working with producers Aaron Dessner (The Nationwide), Danny L Harle, and Mark Bowen from IDLES throughout Everyone Scream, Florence has crafted one thing that doesn’t depend on explosive drama.
Bowen’s affect notably reveals on “One of many Greats,” the place scuzzy, gradual, driving guitars create the form of unhappy rock environment IDLES has perfected.
It’s not about reaching a crescendo. It’s about sustaining a low, fixed depth that’s someway extra exhausting than loudness.
The stripped-back manufacturing makes each phrase land more durable. When Florence sings about milk or faith or males’s music, you hear it with out ornament. Simply voice and which means and the uncomfortable intimacy of each.
The acoustic restraint of “Buckle” provides one thing followers have needed from Florence for years: a genuinely tender second that explores the softer registers of her voice with out theatrical embellishment. It’s a small music on an album of rituals, and its smallness issues.
Followers on-line have been piecing collectively theories with the dedication of students. Reddit threads dissect the mythic mom witch symbolism, noting how Florence positions herself as each creator and destroyer, nurturer and oracle. TikTok customers have created complete aesthetic boards across the “Sympathy Magic” period, all milk baths and candles and tarot playing cards.
YouTube feedback describe these songs as non-public rituals you’re not presupposed to witness, ceremonies taking place behind closed doorways that someway bought recorded.
The comparability that retains showing is to early Lungs-era Florence however with grown-woman readability.
That debut album had the identical mythic depth, nevertheless it was wilder, much less managed. The brand new materials has that depth filtered by way of years of really dwelling with these symbols.
It’s not play-acting witchcraft. It’s documenting what occurs once you’ve been the witch so lengthy you may’t keep in mind who you have been earlier than.
In 2025, listeners are drawn to mystical, symbolic pop in methods they weren’t even 5 years in the past. The rise of tarot as mainstream follow, the rediscovery of people magic traditions, the starvation for artwork that feels ritualistic moderately than consumable.
Florence’s writing sits completely in that intersection of poetry, folklore and emotional confession. It’s not fairly pop, not fairly artwork music, not fairly something simply categorised.
TikTok has created area for what you may name art-pop with ritualistic intimacy. Songs that really feel like spells, that demand you sit nonetheless and concentrate, that refuse straightforward decision.
Florence has all the time made that form of music, however the viewers for it has grown. What felt area of interest in 2009 feels essential now.
This period feels extra intimate and fewer theatrical as a result of it’s. The earlier albums have been usually about grand feelings: large love, devastating loss, ecstatic launch.
These songs are concerning the smaller, stranger emotions that don’t have straightforward names. The exhaustion of performing devotion.
The loneliness of sustaining ritual once you’re undecided if it really works anymore. The grief that doesn’t announce itself however simply quietly takes up residence in your chest.
The album strikes by way of emotional terrain with intention. It opens with celebration, the title observe asserting what Florence turns into when she performs.
Then it shifts into self-examination on “One of many Greats,” questioning whether or not the sacrifice has been definitely worth the accolades.
The center part explores relationship dynamics, energy imbalances, the methods we make ourselves small or permit ourselves to be consumed.
By “You Can Have It All,” close to the album’s finish, there’s a way of give up. Every part given up, all the pieces sacrificed.
The ultimate observe seeks calmer waters, much less turbulence. It feels extra like meditation than music, a musical manifestation of somebody looking for peace after the storm.
There’s a way all through Everyone Scream that Florence is creating from inside a sanctuary she constructed for herself.
Watch the official “Everyone Scream” music video:
Not hiding precisely, however working in a protected area the place she may be trustworthy about what the mythology really prices.
The songs don’t really feel like they have been written for an viewers. They really feel like they have been written for her, and we’re being allowed to hear in.
This period feels transitional within the truest sense. Not a detour, however a essential passage between one state and one other.
The symbolism she’s leaning into suggests bigger work forward. When artists begin stripping issues down, getting quieter, inspecting the foundations, it often means they’re getting ready to construct one thing new.
These songs really feel like clearing the bottom. Marking the perimeter. Deciding what stays and what will get burned away.
What comes subsequent will possible dig deeper into the territory Everyone Scream has mapped. Extra mythology, however private moderately than borrowed.
Extra ritual, however trustworthy about what it prices. Extra quiet depth as a substitute of explosive drama. Florence has all the time been at her finest when she’s following her instincts into stranger territory, trusting that listeners will comply with.
For now, now we have this album. Twelve tracks that really feel like candles in a darkish room. Twelve spells that don’t resolve however simply sit there, glowing, ready to see what they’ll summon subsequent.
