Flame-haired siren Florence Welch releases her sixth album at a spookily appropriate time of year. Everybody Scream exhibits all her usual otherworldly tendencies, but also a more personal tone. Robert Plummer gets a case of the shivers.

There has always been more than a touch of the Gothic drama queen about Florence Welch. With her unashamedly pre-Raphaelite album covers and her epic sagas of gods and monsters, she has proved herself a dab hand at invoking the most unearthly of powers. So what could be more fitting for one of rock’s foremost witchy women than to release a horror-themed album on the very day of All Hallows’ Eve?

Everybody Scream comes three years after her last record, Dance Fever. If you approached that album expecting some lost-in-music mirrorball-fest, you couldn’t have been more wrong: as the track Choreomania made explicit, the dance in question was a dance of death. And the same themes of love, mortality and cosmic transgression predominate once again on this new collection of songs.

It all begins with the startling title track and first single: an eerie church organ and choir set the scene, then the screams kick in. “I will come for you in the evening, ragged and reeling/Shaking my gold like a tambourine,” Florence sings over a pulsing glam-rock beat. It’s a tale of possession that joins the dots between musical and spiritual ecstasy: “Blood on the stage/But how can I leave you when you’re screaming my name?”

You want it darker? Frankly, she’s just getting into her stride. One Of The Greats sees her clawing her way from the grave, Carrie-style (“broken nails and coughing dirt”) before delivering home truths about the male-dominated music industry. “It must be nice to be a man and make boring music just because you can,” she sings witheringly.

In fact, there are strong hints that the invective is aimed at one person in particular. “You’re my second favourite frontman,” she says, in an echo of Mrs Doyle’s description of Father Ted as the second-best priest in Ireland. “And you could have me if you weren’t so afraid of me,” she adds: presumably, wild horses couldn’t drag the name out of her.

In multi-tempo odyssey Witch Dance, Florence runs naked through towns and faces down monsters: “Your threats and your promises, they don’t scare me/After all, there’s no-one more monstrous than me.” After that, Sympathy Magic finds her on familiar terrain, buffeted by supernatural forces and taunting the divine while keening at the top of her voice. “I do not find worthiness a virtue/I no longer try to be good,” she declaims in her best Grace Slick-influenced style.

Perfume And Milk dials down the intensity with slow-burning strummed guitar and a less fraught vocal, but Florence’s mental health (“trying to live but feeling so damaged”) is still in jeopardy. Buckle is similarly subdued, filled with reproach for a selfish lover who treats her as “the buckle on [his] belt”.

In Florence’s world, new behemoths are always liable to surface. Kraken describes an eerie transformation as she turns into the eponymous legendary sea-monster. “Creature from the deep, do I haunt you in your sleep/My tentacles so tender as I caress your cheek,” she sings over lush orchestration, a perfect blend of scariness and sensuality.

Folk-horror overtones are strong in The Old Religion, with its talk of animal instinct, bolts of lightning and scratching at Heaven’s door. Mournful piano sets the tone, but is ultimately overwhelmed by choral overload. The spiritual twilight is maintained on Drink Deep, a sinister mantra with a funereal drumbeat.

The album’s real departure is Music By Men, which takes an unsparing look at a toxic relationship: no angels or demons here, just flawed human beings. Over a bare-bones guitar and piano backing, Florence recalls an abortive couples therapy session (“Put your headphones in so you didn’t have to talk to me”). Finally she puts aside all artifice and utters a plea more chilling than any ghost story: “Let me put out a record and let it not ruin my life.”

There are more sinister fairy tales to come before bedtime. “Dug a hole in the garden and buried a scream/And from it grew a bright red tree,” she recounts on You Can Have It All. But the album ends with her own is-that-all-there-is moment, And Love, which she describes as “more like an animal crawling deep into a cave than a romance novel heroine being swept away”.

As a whole, Everybody Scream bears the hallmarks of the life-changing event that struck its protagonist in 2023. After suffering an ectopic pregnancy that nearly killed her, it’s natural that she should have become preoccupied with her place in the universe, both as an artist and as a woman.

Florence has always put herself on the line. But she seems to have found a deeper connection with her inner feelings here, a new way to let it all out. As the darkness of Winter draws near, this album cuts deeper than a Halloween novelty: by surrendering to the scream inside, Florence has produced possibly her finest work yet.

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You can find Florence + The Machine online here. They are also on Facebook here and on X here.

All words by Robert Plummer. More writing by Robert can be found at his author’s archive. He is also on X as @robertp926.