words by  Chiara Rosati C.

Florence and the Machine is back. With a thunderous, visceral scream. The newest song, “Everybody Scream”, and its evocatively gothic music video directed by Autumn de Wilde just launched the eponymous album era. We will be able to relish the new album in its entirety on Halloween 2025, the day of its official launch. The album cover, also shot by de Wilde, features a fisheye-lens picture of frontwoman Florence Welch lounging in a wooden room and looking longingly into the camera. Teasing us further, the new logo evokes the design of ancient, esoteric inscriptions, especially with the four main lunar phases placed around it. This is the beginning of a new cycle. While the excitement is building, let’s follow the trail of crumbs Florence has left for us and try to decipher their meaning. 

Florence hinted at her return on August 11^th when she published a short video on her Instagram account showing her digging a hole in a field and then screaming in it. It’s a scream of rage, release, resurrection. The second clip showed her lower legs ominously advancing through the field. The videos’ rural, desolate setting is where I would expect to find a wandering Miss Catherine Earnshaw from Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. Interestingly, Florence is wearing a red dress reminiscent of Kate Bush’s red dress in the “Wuthering Heights” music video. The context of Florence’s two teasers was finally revealed with the release of the music video for “Everybody Scream”, the first track of her upcoming new album. In the full video, Kate Bush’s influence becomes even more apparent, for both singers mesmerize the viewers with their feral dancing, although Bush’s whimsicality in “Wuthering Heights” is replaced by a more uncanny, horrific approach in “Everybody Scream”.

In the video’s opening sequence, we soon realize that Florence isn’t just walking through a field. She is following someone. A man. A cowboy riding his horse backwards. And she isn’t alone. Suddenly, a group of women dressed as if they were pupils from the witchcraft academy in American Horror Story: Coven emerge screaming and dancing from behind her back. Are they her loyal companions? Her own personal demons? Maybe both. One doesn’t exclude the other. This is when things start getting… satisfyingly creepy. The location shifts. We are inside an inn. Florence and her demon women are taking over the place, singing and dancing on tables to the point of summoning convulsions à la Vanessa Ives. I wonder if Florence has seen the TV series “Penny Dreadful”. The song becomes an incantation entering everyone’s body, almost as if a mass demonic possession were taking place inside the inn. Everyone… but Mr Cowboy. Florence throws him on the floor and climbs on top of him, screams at him, convulses over him, perhaps to snap him out of his waking slumber. Then, she vomits violas on his face. In Victorian times, according to the “language of flowers”, violas were a symbol of sincere love. Florence is literally vomiting her love. Finally, she gets dragged back to the moor where, on a rudimentary wooden stage, she gets held down by her witchy women and… exorcises something from herself? Or gets possessed by something? I guess Florence wants us to decide.

This music video is not the first collaboration between Florence and Autumn de Wilde, the director of “Emma” (2020). De Wilde had already directed the music videos for “Big God”, “Free”, “My Love”, and “Heaven Is Here”. This creative partnership has translated Florence’s mystical lyricism into a visual, mythical dimension where the emotions and creatures embedded in her songs come to life before our eyes. With “Everybody Scream”, Florence goes back to the motif of choreomania, around which revolved her previous album “Dance Fever” (2022). However, this time her aesthetic takes a folk horror twist. We’re in a world ruled by witchcraft, rituals, and fantasy, capturing the song’s dark ecstasy through the image of a female-led communal frenzy. “The witchcraft, the medicine, the spells and the injections/The harvest, the needle protect me from evil/The magic and the misery, madness and the mystery”, she sings. Florence seems to be listing her new album’s themes. If you are a Florence and the Machine fan, surely you will be no stranger to these topics, for Florence never betrays her personal style – she reinvents it.

The song’s lyrics present the stage as a space of transfiguration and temptation, where Florence’s communion with the audience borders on spiritual possession. In previous interviews, Florence has opened up about her relationship with the stage, describing her live performances as freeing, but also full of discomfort and rage. This song seems to be offering a detailed, yet symbolic portrayal of this experience. The stage gets personified, becoming a female entity: “Get on the stage and I call her by her first name/ Try to stay away but I always meet her back at this place”, she begins. It’s a love-hate relationship, a push and pull. It’s hard to tell whether she is in control or not, whether she is enjoying herself or not. However, no matter how much she is suffering and tiring herself, she always goes back to it, because that’s where she feels free and loved: “Because it’s never enough and she makes me feel loved/ I could come here and scream as loud as I want”. The stage is where she doesn’t have to be quiet or kind; she can just be herself, “extraordinary and normal all at the same time”. She sees her “blood on the stage”: she is bleeding, but “with no pain”. Like a loving mother giving birth to her child, her love for the stage is stronger than her pain. Life and death, pleasure and pain, extremes coexisting: “But how can I leave you when you’re screaming my name?”, she sings. Florence then tries to drag us into her world by coming to us like a bejewelled spectre: “I will come to you in the evening, ragged and reeling/ Shaking my gold like a tambourine.” With the energy of the music, the dancing and the audience, her soul dramatically grows in size: “Here, I can take up the whole of the sky/ Unfurling, becoming my full size/ And look at me burst through the ceiling”. Florence finally turns her inner condition into a spiritual fever spreading through the audience: “Aren’t you so glad you came?/ Breathless and begging and screaming my name”. A choir echoes Welch’s commands – “Scream, sing, dance!” – like a spell being cast on us. When she’s on stage, we are hers.

photography by Autumn de Wilde