Florence Welch has spent more than a decade being projected onto — witch, icon, frontwoman-as-phenomenon — but Everybody Scream sounds like the moment where she stops arguing with the projection and starts interrogating it. The album, released on Halloween, leans fully into the gothic, not as costume or aesthetic, but as consequence. It’s loud, uneven, bruised, occasionally ugly, and very aware of what it costs to keep making records when people already think they know what you are.
“So much of this record is almost about the insecurity of making records,” Welch said. “Did I get it right? Was it even worth giving up another chunk of my life for this?”
That doubt hasn’t faded with success. If anything, it’s hardened into something permanent. “I always expected to be able to make a record and just be like, ‘Yeah, it’s perfect,’” she said. “And I have to accept that it just never happens. It doesn’t seem to be something I allow myself.”
Rather than fighting that instinct, Everybody Scream absorbs it. Welch describes the album as wrestling with “that fury and frustration,” letting it bleed into the sound itself. Nowhere is that clearer than on “One of the Greats,” a song that resists polish at every turn — drifting tempo, abrasive guitar, a vocal that feels like it might collapse before the song finishes.
“It was done in one take,” she said. “We didn’t know what we were doing. I was singing it for the first time. He was playing it for the first time. We were like, ‘Are we going to make it to the end of the song?’”
They tried to fix it later. It didn’t work. “Every time we tried to put it in time with itself, it just lost everything,” Welch said. “I took it to producers who said, ‘This guitar sound is terrible.’ And I was like, ‘No, it’s perfect.’”
One producer wanted to replay it entirely. “I was like, ‘No. That’s not happening.’”
The reason, she explained, was simple. “I could never get that vocal back. Because I didn’t really know where it was going or what it was doing.”
That lack of control became the point. “It was one burst of absolute genius in the moment,” she said, “and then painstaking work for two years just to get it over the line.”
That tension — chaos versus containment — runs through the album. Welch calls Everybody Scream a sister record to Dance Fever, but not a mirror. “The last record was a record of prophecy,” she said. “This record is a record of catastrophe.”
Where Dance Fever wrestled with looming threats and creative anxiety during the pandemic, Everybody Scream lives inside what happened afterward. “Dance Fever was about monsters outside yourself,” she said. “This one is almost about becoming it.”
That shift reframes earlier lyrics, too. The line “Do you see me now?” echoes across albums, but its meaning has mutated. On Dance Fever, Welch says it was a plea — a question thrown upward, uncertain if anything was listening. On Everybody Scream, it’s something closer to a reckoning.
“I was the drunk girl at the gigs,” she said. “No one took you seriously. You were just there to idolize them.” Then, suddenly, she wasn’t. “And you become this huge thing. And it’s like, ‘Do you see me now?’”
The gothic imagery surrounding the album — witches, spells, possession — isn’t an aesthetic pivot so much as a survival strategy. “Real spooky shit happened to me,” Welch said flatly. “It went beyond aesthetic.”
She described the mythology not as escapism but as grounding. “I wasn’t creating mythology to hide the truth,” she said. “It was the truth.”
That truth included a near-death experience onstage, something that reframed her relationship to power and vulnerability. “When something happens to your body that you’re not in control of,” she said, “imagination becomes a way of being free.”
Witchcraft, magic, medicine — all became tools for understanding what had happened, and for reclaiming agency. “It was a way of finding power in a situation where I felt completely powerless.”
That sense of power — and its cost — is also tied to performance itself. Welch talked about standing before tens of thousands of people, absorbing their energy, holding it together. “You have to make your energy so big,” she said, “that you can hold all those people in that one moment with you.”
The album grapples with what happens when that enormity doesn’t fit neatly into a normal life. “There’s this crazy force inside of me that’s always trying to get out,” she said, “even when I’m trying to do the normal things of life.”
Visually, Everybody Scream is just as deliberate. Welch remains unapologetic about expensive, cinematic music videos. “Yes,” she laughed. “We are still making them.”
Working with Autumn de Wilde, she said, adds layers she didn’t even know were there. “She hears things in the music that I know are there, but don’t fully realize,” Welch said — outlaw energy, western loneliness, backward horsemen riding alongside witches.
Even the album artwork pulls from that collision, referencing McCabe & Mrs. Miller and 1970s cinema, folding westerns into the gothic. “It’s all connected,” she said.
For all the screaming, the album ends quietly. “And Love,” with it's parting lyric "peace is coming," closes the record not with triumph but surrender. “If songs are prophecies,” Welch said, “let it be this one.”
She paused. “Resting instead of running.”
It’s not certainty. It’s not closure. It’s Florence Welch releasing something into the world and hoping it comes true.
Watch the full interview above and then check out the video below.
