When Florence Welch jumped headlong into the crowd at the end of a Saturday afternoon set on an obscure stage at the 2009 Oxegen festival at Punchestown in Co Kildare, she was, in a way, leaping into a future of her own imagining. From the humble beginnings of a slot at Oxegen’s Red Bull Music Academy – capacity: tiny – she quickly ascended to arena mega-stardom. Yet as she did so, she abided faithfully by the core principles that life is always better in a Wicker Man adjacent ethereal frock and that the bigger the song, the more impressive the results.
She holds to those values on her extraordinary sixth LP, Everybody Scream, but with one crucial difference. This time, the folk horror trappings – long part of her artistic persona – are informed by a personal trauma all too real and life-changing. More than that, the experience is one which many listeners may have encountered in their own lives – or the lives of those close to them. Two years ago, Welch had a miscarriage. Shortly afterwards, she almost died after an undetected ectopic pregnancy required life-saving surgery.
These events have led her to create an album steeped in pain, yet with one foot in the phantasmagorical realm she already inhabited at Oxegen 16 years ago. This is entirely deliberate on Welch’s part. After the antiseptic horror of the operating theatre, she wanted to retreat to somewhere mysterious and comfortingly otherworldly. Hence, a project that functions like the prog-pop equivalent of CS Lewis’s magical wardrobe to Narnia. The further in you go, the weirder and more fantastically eerie it becomes.
“When you have to have emergency surgery, the lights are so bright; it’s so clinical,” she told Rolling Stone recently. “There was a sense afterwards that I needed to be near to the earth. I needed to be near natural things.”
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She added that the pageantry and mythology of witchcraft served as a guiding light in a dark moment. “Everywhere you look in terms of stories of birth and life and death, I found stories of witchcraft. You couldn’t look into anything about it and not find these folktales or find stories of witches or magic because it is so unknown. No one could tell me why this happened to me. They [told me] ‘just bad luck’. When no one can tell you why, you’re looking to find meaning. You’re looking to find a way to understand it, and also some kind of control.”
Everybody Scream is shouty from the start. A pantomime pop onslaught of chunky guitar introduces the opener (and title track) – to which Welch adds her goose-bump inducing Valkyrie wail while the lyrics paint a visceral picture of “blood on the stage” (she was mid performance when her ectopic pregnancy triggered severe internal bleeding).
To make music that is as unsettling as it is catchy is a tall order, but one which Welch carries off effortlessly on a collection that features collaborations with Mark Bowen, the Irish guitarist with post-punk band Idles, in addition to Taylor Swift producer Aron Dessner and Japanese-American singer Mitski. The emotional centrepiece is One of the Greats, where she drily decries the sexism of the music industry (“it must be nice to be a man and making boring music just because you can”) and then imagines herself risen from the grave, causing power outages (“Arms outstretched, back from the dead”). Windswept and awestruck, it’s the Brontë sisters gone goth – the Florence and the Machine witching hour glam revival aesthetic distilled into five irresistible minutes.
Nothing else on this excellent album matches it for sheer shutters-blowing-on-doors intensity. That said, Welch makes a respectable stab at PJ Harvey-type skeletal folk on Perfume and Milk and achieves a Tori Amos-soundtracking-Midsommar throb and sob of The Old Religion. It finishes with the powerfully plaintive And Love, where Welch emerges from a hurricane of angst and looks tentatively to the future – an optimistic full stop at the conclusion of perhaps her finest and certainly her stormiest record to date.
