Florence + The Machine have pulled back the curtain on their next chapter, unveiling the brand-new single One Of The Greats. The track is the second taste of Florence Welch’s upcoming sixth studio album Everybody Scream, set for release on 31 October.
For Welch, the song is both a confession and a challenge to herself. “It was sort of a long poem about the cost of greatness,” she explains. “Who gets to decide what that is? Why do I even want it? Why am I never satisfied?”
The track arrived in a moment of instinctive creativity. Written in one take with Mark Bowen of IDLES, One Of The Greats was born from a raw session where Bowen played guitar and Welch sang directly from the page. “We meant to re-record it but the first take just had this amazing energy,” Welch recalls. From there, Aaron Dessner (The National, Taylor Swift) stepped in to help shape the track into its final, transcendent form. “I wanted it to feel like you were disintegrating into nothing at the end. Which is sometimes what the creative process feels like to me. Death and resurrection over and over.”
Thematically, the song reflects Welch’s struggle with the scrutiny and contradictions of fame. Early in her career, she says, her grand artistic expression was often met with ridicule. “I was thrust into the spotlight but told again and again I didn’t deserve it,” she explains. One Of The Greats distils that 15-year frustration while balancing it with her signature wit.
The new single follows the title track Everybody Scream, released last month alongside a striking video by longtime collaborator Autumn de Wilde. Critics quickly praised Welch’s return: The New York Times hailed her as “Pop’s glorious enchantress,” while Stereogum called the song “a grand, gothic, synth-powered anthem with the kind of chorus a whole arena could easily pick up on.”
Like the title track, One Of The Greats signals a darker, more reflective chapter in the Florence + The Machine catalogue. The album was written and produced with a trusted creative circle including Bowen, Dessner and Mitski.
The seeds of Everybody Scream were planted in the aftermath of Welch’s brush with mortality. During the Dance Fever tour, she underwent emergency surgery that left her confronting the fragility of her body. That experience steered her towards mysticism, witchcraft and folk horror as creative touchstones. The album explores themes of womanhood, mortality, partnership and transcendence-threads of light woven into shadows.
Florence + The Machine’s trajectory has always been dramatic. From their 2009 debut Lungs through Ceremonials (2011), How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful (2015), High As Hope (2018) and Dance Fever (2022), Welch has cultivated one of the most distinctive voices in modern music. Her live shows are seismic events-blurring ritual and rock spectacle-earning her a place on the world’s most iconic stages and festivals. Along the way, she has performed with The Rolling Stones, collaborated with Lady Gaga and Taylor Swift, and even found time to publish a collection of lyrics and poetry, Useless Magic.
Florence + The Machine’s Everybody Scream arrives on 31 October, a gothic release date for a record that promises both darkness and light.
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