Florence Welch is tired of seeing her own face. Cameras everywhere, phones everywhere, the modern musician’s curse of existing in public from every possible angle. So she ditches the video, laughs about crawling across radio station floors to avoid lenses, and immediately seems more present for it. “You’ll get a better interview,” she promises. She’s right. Everybody Scream sounds like someone who stopped worrying about how they look a long time ago and started worrying about something much bigger: what it costs to keep making art at this level, and whether the exchange rate is still worth it.
“This record is almost about the insecurity of making records,” Welch says, detonating the myth of artistic confidence. “Did I get it right? Was it even worth giving up another chunk of my life for this?” It’s a strange thing to hear from someone this far into a career that started with Lungs and never stopped expanding outward. But insecurity, she admits, isn’t a phase you age out of. It’s a feature. “I always expected to be able to make a record and just be like, ‘Yeah, it’s perfect.’ And I have to accept that it just never happens.”
That acceptance is all over Everybody Screams, which arrives on Halloween like it was summoned rather than scheduled. It’s her gothiest record yet, though that feels less like a costume choice and more like an inevitability. This is, after all, the woman who opened her career with “My Boy Builds Coffins.” What’s different now is the willingness to leave things messy. Welch talks at length about “One of the Greats,” a song built around a guitar take so imperfect that other producers wanted to fix it, replay it, sand it smooth. “They were like, ‘This guitar sound is terrible,’” she recalls. “And I was like, ‘No, it’s perfect.’”
Perfect because it wasn’t. The tempo wobbles. The tuning isn’t polite. It speeds up, slows down, threatens to collapse under its own weight. Welch and Bowen played it once, eyes locked, half-convinced they wouldn’t make it to the end of the song. “We were keeping the most insane eye contact,” she says. “We both looked deranged.” That take survived because it couldn’t be recreated. “I could never get that vocal back,” she says. “I didn’t really know where it was going.” It’s the Merry Clayton scream in “Gimme Shelter” logic: the flaw is the point.
That sense of barely-holding-it-together energy runs through the album, especially in how it converses with Dance Fever. Welch calls them sister records—Dance Fever as prophecy, Everybody Screams as catastrophe. Songs talk to each other across albums: “Daffodil” opening a door to this record’s sound, “Cassandra” asking “Do you see me?” during the pandemic when live music felt like it might be gone forever, and “Kraken” flipping that line into something monstrous. “This record is almost like becoming it,” she says. If Dance Fever wrestled with monsters outside herself, Everybody Screams admits the monster moved in and made itself comfortable.
There’s revenge in that admission too. Welch talks about coming up in a male-dominated indie scene as “the drunk girl that came to the gigs,” least likely to be taken seriously, least likely to survive. “Do you see me now?” isn’t just mythic—it’s pointed. She idolized those frontmen, borrowed their masculinity, and outlasted the room. “I don’t think they could have ever imagined that I would be the one to come out of that scene,” she says, almost laughing at the improbability of it all.
The witchiness this time around isn’t cosplay. Welch is blunt about that. “Real spooky shit happened to me,” she says, describing a near-death experience onstage that forced her to reckon with powerlessness in her own body. Witchcraft, mythology, and occult study became less aesthetic than survival tactic—a way to understand what happened and reclaim agency. “It wasn’t creating mythology to hide the truth,” she says. “It was the truth.”
That truth spills into the visuals too. Welch remains stubbornly devoted to big, expensive music videos in an era that would rather she upload a looping Spotify canvas and call it a day. Working with director Autumn de Wilde, she leans into worlds that feel overbuilt on purpose: witches alongside backwards horsemen, medieval taverns that double as bordellos, outlaw energy creeping into gothic spaces. De Wilde hears things Welch knows are there but hasn’t fully articulated yet, and pulls them into focus.
Even the album artwork comes with footnotes, referencing McCabe & Mrs. Miller and its muddy, haunted Western melancholy. Seventies cinema, Victorian occult texts, Edwardian imagery—it all stacks up like a personal syllabus Welch assigns herself every album cycle. “They become these mini reference projects,” she says. “I learn a little more about the world every time.”
For all the screaming, the album closes quietly. “And love” features the closing lyrics "peace is coming," which isn’t triumph so much as surrender. Welch talks about songs as prophecies, and if that’s true, she wants this one to land. Less running. More resting. A rare moment of gentleness from an artist who understands exactly how loud she can get—and what it takes to carry that kind of energy inside a normal life.
If Everybody Scream is about becoming the monster, it’s also about learning when to let it sleep.
Watch the full interview above and then check out the video below.
