“It must be nice to be a man, and make boring music just because you can,” Florence Welch sings midway through her sixth album Everybody Scream’s second track, “One of the Greats,” and you can hear the sneer progressively curl into something closer to exhaustion. This time around, Welch turns her signature pageantry inward, transforming her usual cathedral of sound into a hall of mirrors. She sounds less like a prophet summoning deliverance and more like someone auditing her own fantasy—counting the bruises left by years of reaching for clarity.

Across the record, Welch trades some of the operatic thunder of How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful and Dance Fever for a more muscular kind of drama. Soft-rock guitars cut through the mist of her usual choral storms, giving the album a simmering, almost domestic tension. Her past albums often felt like operatic purges—Welch wading through personal apocalypse in full Wagnerian costume—here, the spectacle is internalized and sharpened. Collaborators Mitski and Aaron Dessner push her toward hushed corners of uncomfortability and folk-horror intimacy, while her vocals float above the arrangements like smoke in a sunbeam.

Everybody Scream ultimately feels like a ledger of survival—Welch reckoning with her own body, her own grief, and the pressures of being an artist. There’s a generosity in her self-exposure: even at her most indulgent, the album carries a pulse of urgency, a reminder that art can be simultaneously gorgeous and bruising. Moments of restrained aggression and atmospheric textures make the flecks of release land harder, while the intimate production invites listeners into a space that feels almost confrontational. It’s a record that asks you to sit between the scream and what comes after—and in that balancing act, Welch proves herself still capable of conjuring wonder without ever softening the edge.