(Credits: Far Out / Florence + The Machine / David Lee)
Sat 15 November 2025 7:30, UK
While women are definitively taking over the music landscape with force, it also begs the question: what if you’re not the pint-size, slick, and pop pinnacle of femininity? Florence Welch might just hold the answer.
Everybody Scream, the latest album from Florence and the Machine, is, in many ways, the epitome of messiness, spectrality, and imperfection. Yet in its very midst, this precise quality is also what makes the record so transcendental, and perhaps the best of Welch’s career so far.
Over the years, she has harnessed the art of making her work seem like an effortless one-woman show, but in this most recent era, something is a little different: her collaborators and influences are much plainer to see, and this translates both sonically and lyrically into some of the most searing nuggets of honesty she has ever produced.
This process of transparency on Everybody Scream began with its announcement, where Welch explained that she had been working with Mark Bowen of Idles fame over the course of the record as a whole. But the very next name to pop up on that list was Mitski, the American singer-songwriter who has become known for being one of the most innovative self-made forces in all of music in recent memory. Who better for Welch to flex her sonic muscles with?
Marking one of the first times Mitski has worked on a fellow musician’s record, particularly one as seismic as Welch, was bound to have been an intimidating challenge. But if she felt any nerves, it certainly didn’t shine through on her collaborative efforts from Everybody Scream, including its eponymous title track and the song ‘Buckle’. Indeed, on the former, Welch explained to Zane Lowe that the song had been tediously workshopped by her and Bowen before Mitski came in to give the track its defining finishing touches.
“The song really didn’t become what it was until Mitski came on board,” Welch candidly admitted, before adding, “She came to the studio one day and was like, ‘You need a chorus. I just feel like there’s a chorus coming after this drone, it’s so striking.’ Working with her, honestly, she’s one of my favourite artists of all time.”
That was all reasonable to say in terms of ‘Everybody Scream’, with all its brooding, spectral witchiness, but by the time you then reach the album’s sixth track, ‘Buckle’, the production is much more stripped back and raw.
The inviting acoustics are plainly Mitski’s imprint, with some of the most frank writing in lyrics such as, “Oh, baby, I just buckle my resolution in tatters/ ‘Cause I know it won’t work, but make it ache, make it hurt,” followed by, “I’m still hanging off the buckle on your belt.”
There’s a viscerality in these images that ebbs with an almost grotesque pain, the human body and mind moved to extreme measures in order to present a certain image. Both of these artists have never been particularly interested in the pretty, the palatable, or the popular. That’s why, deep in their blackened souls of malicious desire, Welch and Mitski might just make the most perfectly imperfect musical pairing we’ve ever seen.
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