In August 2023, Florence + the Machine frontwoman Florence Welch suffered a catastrophic miscarriage at age 37, shortly after deciding to try for a baby with her boyfriend. “The closest I came to making life was the closest I came to death,” Welch, now 39, told The Guardian in September. “And I felt like I had stepped through this door, and it was just full of women, screaming.”
The experience led to the inception of Everybody Scream, an album full of rage, grief, horror, and musings on what it means to suffer such grief and return to the world as if nothing happened.
Welch got pregnant quickly after ruminating on whether or not to have kids in her 2022 song “King,” in which she fears that becoming a mother could ruin her career. “It was my first experience of even trying to get pregnant, and I thought, there’s no way, because I’m ancient,” she told The Guardian. “It was a big shock. But it felt magical, as well. I felt I had followed a bodily instinct, in that animal sense, and it had happened.”
Welch learned that she’d miscarried early, before she and her partner told anyone, while on tour. She continued performing while bleeding with the help of ibuprofen and suppressing her emotions in the unique way women so often do.
It wasn’t until her doctor urged her to get checked over that she learned that she was experiencing an ectopic pregnancy and her fallopian tube had ruptured. “I had a Coke can’s worth of blood in my abdomen,” Welch recalled.
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She was rushed into an emergency surgery. Her fallopian tube couldn’t be saved. She remembers howling when she got home. “I think the sound that came out of me was like a wounded animal or something,” she said. “And then, that was that.”
“Ten days later, I was back on stage.” Then, back to writing and recording. And, now, Everybody Scream.
“I feel no pain, I break down, and get up, and do it all again,” Welch sings in the album opener, the title track, before a chorus set to a background of screams.
“Look at me run myself ragged, blood on the stage,” she goes on. “But how can I leave when you’re calling my name?”
If female rage were an album, this is it, and the band knows it. Ahead of its release, they shared a video compilation on Instagram of women screaming in horror films like Us, Midsommar, and The Shining.
Welch surveys the life she has created and assesses the pressure to return to it despite the personal tragedy she’s quietly dealing with. “I crawled up from under the earth, broken nails and coughing dirt, spitting out my songs so you could sing along,” opens “One of the Greats.”
At home, though, “there’s not much applause,” she notes on “Music by Men,” a song that paints a portrait of driving home from couples’ therapy with her boyfriend.
Harsh on herself in places, Welch is also incredibly raw in her musings on her own grief. Child loss and questions about female identity as a childless woman radiate through the album, even down to the cover art, which sees Welch, draped in a gown, posed with her knees open on a bed, almost feigning childbirth.
“I sit in the salt water, call in a vision of my daughter, light a candle, place my grief upon the altar,” she opens with on “You Can Have It All,” a song about accepting how little control we really have over our lives.
“I used to think I knew what sadness was. I was wrong. A piece of flesh, a million pounds. Am I a woman now?” she sings. “I stay in the house, move the furniture about, try and control what I can, and feel the world slip through my hand.”
Flip-flopping between notes on her own fame and her womanhood, Welch poetically unpacks what we lose when we achieve our dreams and what we lose when our dreams are taken from us.
Unfolding like a gothic novel, the album is cathartic and gut-wrenching. Following a week soundtracked by Lily Allen’s West End Girl, Everybody Scream is Welch’s punctuation on the message that women don’t have to go quietly or with grace.
