Florence Welch Ushers in Witching Hour and Casts a Spell With Her Voice

“I can come here and scream as loud as I want,” Florence Welch, the auburn-haired frontwoman of Florence + The Machine, wails in “Everybody Scream,” her latest album’s title track and the band’s concert opener in its 55-date tour of North America and Europe. Scream she does. Her haunting, powerful voice — often compared to Kate Bush, PJ Harvey, Stevie Nicks, and Bjork — blew the audience away while also somehow creating a feeling of intimacy at the 19,600-person capacity TD Garden in Boston on Monday night. She plays three sold out shows at Madison Square Garden and Barclay’s Center this week.Ms. Welch says she made the new album with a sense of “urgency,” coming from a dark place after suffering an ectopic pregnancy in 2023, losing the baby and nearly her life. The word “scream” is in almost every song. Ms. Welch has said in interviews that she needed to return to the studio to find her familiar self — the artists, the performer — to heal.She also turned to the occult and nature. The album and the band’s live performances are steeped in witchy, Gothic imagery. The live shows feature four dancers clad in black dresses and petticoats that Ms. Welch calls her “witch choir.” She sings about spells and potions and draws parallels between herself as an unmarried, childless 39-year-old and accused witches in history who were often property owners and unwed.Yet it is the grounded, deeply human struggles Ms. Welch sings about that resonate most deeply. The central one of this album is how can a woman be ambitious, follow her creative drive, and seek fame and fortune while also finding love, building a family, and not missing out on the “normal” joys of life?In the song “You Can Have It All,” Ms. Welch sings about grief over her lost daughter and the illusion of the feminist idiom the chorus repeats. “A piece of flesh, a million pounds/ Am I a woman now?” she sings. She’s made money, has fame, but she doesn’t have a baby or a husband. What does it mean to “have it all,” to be successful as a woman?In “One of the Greats,” a stripped-down indie folk song, Ms. Welch sings about female ambition, how the music industry punishes motherhood, and how men are often afraid of a successful woman. “You could have me if you weren’t so afraid of me / It’s funny how men don’t find power very sexy,” she sings. This line earned screams from the Boston audience.Florence + The Machine. Caroline McCaugheyFor Ms. Welch, the drive to create — the “brutality of ambition” — trumps all, and it’s come at the expense of a family. Pain and struggle are the material she mines for her work. “It’s the sacrifice to you but it’s the gift to everyone else,” she told an interviewer at CBS. “You always choose the song.”The album spans from indie rock to folk to baroque pop, with a harp, violin, synth, drums, and bass rounding out the band — The Machine — and Ms. Welch’s voice carrying every song. She commanded the stage at Boston in a long, flowy green dress, her red hair loose to her waist like a sorceress. She performed the whole show barefoot, racing up and down the catwalk stage that jutted out over the audience. The witch choir surrounded her like a coven.Most of the setlist was from “Everybody Scream,” but the band mixed in some of the hits like “Shake It Out” and “Dog Days Are Over.” Halfway through the latter, Ms. Welch paused singing to implore the audience to put away their phones. “If you are doing this,” she said, motioning holding a phone to record, “you’re not doing this,” she said, jumping up and down. The crowd obeyed her command and put their phones away.Florence + The Machine. Caroline McCaugheyThe band ended the show on a hopeful note with the song “And Love,” with Ms. Welch repeating the chorus, “Peace is coming.” She introduced the song by saying, “If songs are prayers or spells, or if they have a prophetic nature to them, let this song be the one that comes true.”I wasn’t a huge Florence + The Machine fan when I arrived at the concert this week. What initially piqued my interest in the band was an image of a white board Ms. Welch posted to Instagram while recording this album. “Swans vs. Adele,” the board said. Fronted by Michael Gira since the early 1980s, Swans has a brutal, droning, no-wave sound. Adele can knock any singer out of the park. I was sold.Yet when I arrived at TD Garden, the two-thirds female audience with their uniform of flower crowns, witchy boots, and flowy long dresses turned me off. This tarot card, hippie-goth millennial feminism was transgressive in the late 1990s but felt packaged, mall-ready without the malls.Then Ms. Welch started singing. Now, I’m hooked.

Florence Welch Ushers in Witching Hour and Casts a Spell With Her Voice

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