This is the most devastating Florence and the Machine album yet

Krakens emerging from the deep, a woman back from death making street lamps explode as she walks beneath, an English pastoral descending into “rot and ruin”. Short of Florence Welch calling around to your house and jumping out from behind the sofa as you’re settling down to Celebrity Traitors, it’s hard to see how Florence and the Machine could have made a scarier record.

But despite a title that references Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas – “Everybody scream!” goes the first song, a line lifted from the soundtrack to the stop-motion classic – this often stunning and visceral LP is a ghost-train ride to a darker destination. Welch, it is true, loves her hokum as much as anyone. Since arriving in 2009 with her Kate Bush-goes-indie debut Lungs, her music has pulsated with a theatrical and elemental power – with melodrama and sometimes even a hint of the pantomime.

That is assuredly not the case on Everybody Scream – which reboots Welch’s windswept alternative pop with an autumnal ache and a gothic folk-rock veneer. Across 12 mournful and unflinching songs, Welch unpacks the miscarriage she experienced in 2023 and a related ectopic pregnancy that required life-saving surgery.

That the rawness of these traumas is still understandably with Welch just two years later is evident on the title track (co-written with Japanese-American cult artist Mitski). Kicking off with a choral refrain that sounds like Enya trapped in the Dark Tower of Mordor, the tune builds to a hurricane-strength baroque ballad. Guitars squeal and grind. Welch’s lyrics glisten like an open wound: “But look at me, run myself ragged… blood on the stage”.

Welch has talked in interviews about how the music industry leaves women with a binary choice. Pursue their career, or have a family. That is partly because of how society is structured. But also because the record business is essentially still in the dark ages when it comes to gender equality.

Her frustration is powerfully evoked on “One of the Greats”. As grungy guitar from Mark Bowen of post-punks Idles builds, Welch laments the privilege of male rockers who get to work in an industry that exists primarily to fuel their ego (“it must be nice to be a man and make boring music just because you can”).

There are a few stodgy bits on Everybody Scream, such as plodding power ballad “Sympathy Magic”, where she sounds like Bonnie Tyler pretending to be in the Sisters of Mercy. Still, at its most bombastic, her sixth studio release reverberates with an almost operatic ferocity that represents new territory for co-producer Aaron Dessner – the understated National guitarist perhaps best known for his work on Taylor Swift’s Folklore.

Welch is audibly emoting from the depths of her soul across the record. But there’s still space for the spooky and fantastical – would it be a Florence album if there wasn’t? Folk horror imagery abounds on the nervy jangler “Kraken,” where she imagines herself as a Biblical leviathan emerging from the deep.

Next comes the thrilling twist as the tune coasts into one of the tenderest choruses she has ever written – a wispy “a-ah-ah” that plaintively echoes her foundational hit, “Days Are Over”. There are several such moments sprinkled throughout Everybody Scream. The spectral falsetto that drives piano lament “The Old Religion,” is one; the sobbing melody of “You Can Have It All” another. Many great horror movies end with a plucky heroine surviving the worst fate has thrown at her. On Everybody Scream, Florence emerges as pop’s ultimate final girl. Having gone to hell and back, she tells the tale on one of the most accomplished albums of her career.

Stream: “One of the Greats”, “Kraken”