Entertainment The Florence + the Machine star opens up on the “life-and-death experience” behind her excellent new album, working with Taylor Swift, and why she’s looking forward to turning 40 If you talk to Florence Welch on any given day, it’s safe to assume she’s feeling a little anxious. “Anxiety is the constant hum of my life,” she says. “Then I step out onstage, and it goes away.” Luckily, that’s where she is right now: draped in a long white dress, sitting comfortably in front of a 150-person audience at New York’s beautiful Cherry Lane Theatre, a storied downtown venue known as the birthplace of off-Broadway theater. It’s a week before the release of Everybody Scream, the excellent sixth album she made with her band, Florence + the Machine, and Welch is here for the first-ever live edition of the Rolling Stone Interview, the magazine’s long-running deep-dive conversation series. (The interview is also the first-ever video podcast version of the franchise — check it out on Rolling Stone’s YouTube channel and wherever you get your podcasts.) Watch the video interview below During both the interview and a stripped-down, spellbinding performance, the energy in the room is as electric as the new album — even when the subject matter is not necessarily light. Made with collaborators like the National’s Aaron Dessner, Idles’ Mark Bowen, Mitski, and James Ford, Everybody Scream is a visceral and mystical reflection on life and loss, not to mention a showcase for Welch’s remarkable voice, which has proved to be one of the most powerful instruments in popular music since her band debuted in 2009. The songs were spurred by her experiences touring in support of 2022’s Dance Fever, where she suffered an ectopic pregnancy and ruptured fallopian tube that required life-saving emergency surgery. Throughout the conversation, Welch balances a deep candor with a dry wit while analyzing the ways she’s evolved over the years, and what it’s meant for her music. “The calmer my life got, the wilder I could be in my performance styles and in my videos and in my artwork,” she surmises, midway through our talk. “I found that freedom from shame means that you can explore so many more different things in your work, and I really found that to be amazing.” Florence Welch in New York, NY on Oct. 24, 2025. Welch’s new album, titled “Everybody Scream,” is due to release on Oct. 31, 2025. The story of this album starts with your last tour, for 2022’s Dance Fever. Can you tell me about going into that tour and how you left as a different person after it?I guess in a way Dance Fever was a record of prophecy and this record is a record of catastrophe. [Dance Fever] dealt with performance as well, and the fact that all the performance had been taken away. There was a period when musicians really didn’t know if live music would come back, and it was a record questioning whether I wanted to keep doing it or whether I would want to start a family. And then on that tour, I had a life-and-death experience that then led me into making this record. Everybody Scream came out of wanting to go deeper into magic and mysticism. Like, “OK, shit is coming true. I really need to figure out what’s fucking going on here.” It opened up a portal to another place. It was a place of real exploration, and it opened up all these different tendrils of myself going through something like that. Have you ever had an album or song prophesize what came after? It was never this literal. I wrote a song [for Dance Fever] called “King,” which was wrestling with whether I wanted to be a mother. There was a line in it that was like, “I never knew my killer would be coming from within.” The thing that nearly killed me was a complication with a pregnancy loss onstage. It was never that on the nose. What brought you to study more magic and mysticism? When something happens in the body, you feel so powerless. I think I was looking for forms of power and felt very primal. It was very sudden, very violent, [and] absolutely saved my life. When you have to have emergency surgery, the lights are so bright; it’s so clinical. There was a sense afterwards that I needed to be near to the earth. I needed to be near natural things. Everywhere you look in terms of stories of birth and life and death, I found stories of witchcraft. You couldn’t look into anything about it and not find these folktales or find stories of witches or magic because it is so unknown. No one could tell me why this happened to me. They [told me] “just bad luck.” When no one can tell you why, you’re looking to find meaning. You’re looking to find a way to understand it, and also some kind of control. You experienced pregnancy loss onstage, while performing in front of thousands of people. How did you navigate that as a performer?I was in pain. And what do you do as a woman? I just took some ibuprofen [and] went to work. I was in a place that I understood. I was in a place of bodily power and control, and I was experiencing a loss. I didn’t know it was a dangerous loss, but I was like, “I’m going to get through this, and if I can get through this show, at least I haven’t lost another thing.” When I stepped out on that stage, all the pain just went away, and I was free. It was weirdly an incredible show because I didn’t know that I was dying in some way. I didn’t know I had internal bleeding by then. But I felt this kind of presence that’s always been with me onstage take over, and it carried me through the whole thing. It was like love or something. I was in the mud and in a hurricane, and weirdly, it was really beautiful. Does that sound