A fan love letter and contemplations about Florence and the Machine, 2026.
Upon the stage at the Antwerpen Sportpaleis, Florence Welch cuts a striking, fiery-headed figure in a sea of smoke and lights and glowing devices. In rippling black robes and bare feet, she floats from end to end of the platform, her sirenic voice like an iron cage that holds an entire stadium of 15,000 fans in rapture – myself among them for the first time.
Yet in the moments when the crowd stops roaring long enough to let her speak, Florence’s voice is soft and birdlike, brimming with nervous exuberance that seems to be her kind of confidence. It lends a disarming air to this 17-year veteran performer, who still carries the vestige of the fearful rabbit heart that she once embodied at the outset of her fame – a special kind of vulnerability that has long kept Florence so compelling as an artist.
Welch’s work has always confessed the toll of creating art in the public eye. She had a little of it in her debut record, the baroque-fairy-pop perfection that was Lungs (2009), with the aforementioned Rabbit Heart (Raise It Up). Herein, Florence discusses her terror of fame and scrutiny while simultaneously trying to psych herself up for it. All of this through twinkling harp strings and jaunty Wonderland-esque lyrical imagery that makes me feel like Alice taking one bite of mushroom and growing to dizzying heights.
Sometimes, I worry this vulnerability will be her undoing, like it has been for too many pop stars and rock stars to count. What more for pop-rock stars?
Like the tide bringing it back to me
Halfway into the show, the setlist settles into more downtempo tracks, and Florence herself grows a little less animated, soothing the raw-throated crowd. The night before had been the Paris stop of the Everybody Scream tour, meaning there had been a long bus ride to Antwerp with little sleep for Florence and the Machine, though you still wouldn’t know it from the way the stadium still crackled with their energy. As the stage went dim and Florence began to speak under the lone spotlight, I tried to guess what song could be so important that it would get an entire prelude speech, when even the earlier jubilant performance of the 10-year-old cult favorite Which Witch did not.
“This next song is special. I wanted to thank you all for bringing it back to me.” All around the stadium, phone lights begin winking on in the hands of fans, as if to accentuate her hopeful words. “I couldn’t perform it for ten years. It reminded me of such a hard time in my life. But now I can sing it again.” She laughs. “Cause so much worse has happened now, and it’s not so bad anymore!”
That funny-dark quip aside, to my surprise, the song was Never Let Me Go. I had never thought of the sumptuous piano ballad from album #2 Ceremonials as especially painful or vulnerable, that it would be to Florence what Jolene is to Dolly Parton. Florence never performed it live from 2012 to 2022, not from lack of interest but that it seemingly pained her to do so. Welch wrote the song during a time she was known to struggle with substance addiction, and perhaps it brought back too many memories of sadness and dysfunction. Knowing this now and re-listening to the song, I can hear how the vocals must have been a challenge, even for Florence. There is an unbridled anguish that is beyond technical, and rather more of a spiritual state you must be able to summon at will and control.
I still wonder about that. How can you lay yourself so bare already a hundred times, then for years be unable to sing the same song again? How do you keep that amount of sensitivity towards your own creation, to have shaped it in a way that still cuts you when you hold it? That might be another clue to Florence’s tremendous gravitas.
Regrets collect like old friends
For the second time now, a pretty important person has been conspicuously missing from a Florence + the Machine tour. It’s none other than the original “Machine”, keyboardist-producer-songwriter Isabella Summers. Nowadays, the backing band of Rob Ackroyd (guitar), Christopher Hayden (drums), and Tom Monger (harp) are credited as the Machine, but that moniker was originally for Summers alone, from back when she and Florence were gals in South London trying to make music without men.
In the 2000s, Isabella Summers was a DJ and budding music producer, then active in London’s underground music scene. A lifelong hiphop-head, Isa’s music taste was much shaped by her father and friend circle of older boys in her seaside town, who smoked weed everyday while listening to hard American rap and turntabling. Determined to make music of her own, Isa bought her own decks at 18 and moved to South London, where she would produce music for indie rappers like Skinnyman and Kashmere the Iguana Man. Unfortunately, not many records from these artists are archived online, and Isa has no formal credits from this period. (She would later produce tracks for West Coast icon The Game, like “On One,” which is a taste of how she must’ve been in her hip-hop days.)
London’s underground hip-hop scene in 2005 was a real sausage-fest, as you might expect, and the petite Isabella described her experience of “turning up to gigs, [5 feet] tall with her bag of Mobb Deep records terrified and having to properly psyche herself up to go in and DJ.” Isa picked up the nickname “Machine” during this period for her fortitude and relentless time spent at her computer making beats and mixing music.
Soon enough however, Isa Machine was “sick of boys telling [her] what to do” and fell into a creative slump. The antidote, Isa believed, would be making music with another woman. Fortunately for music history, Isabella Summers had become acquainted with and impressed by a young singer named Florence Welch through their shared London music circles, and invited Florence to make music together at her studio. (Florence, for her part, had just left an all-male funk band called Ashok, an experience she has rarely if ever spoken about but did not seem to have enjoyed.)
The pair worked on several demos in half-hour sessions, with Welch howling lyrics she’d just written into the mic and Summers banging on the walls to make beats. A fun bit of trivia is that in 2007, the duo released their first EP together as Florrible and Misrabella, which is just so cute as to make me melt. Here’s one of the surviving songs from that short-lived era:
Soon after, they renamed themselves to the more stately Florence + the Machine and got together with the other band members, making the official lineup we know today, with Florence on vocals, and Isabella on keyboards and production.
Notably, Dog Days Are Over is one of Isa’s brainchildren with Florence, and over a dozen more, including Cosmic Love, Between Two Lungs, No Light No Light, Breath of Life, How Big How Blue How Beautiful, Delilah, and Which Witch. While Isa was credited for less than half of Florence + the Machine’s discography (unlike Florence who was a writer for everything), she contributed immensely to the group’s signature symphonic sound from 2009 – 2015. Most importantly, I can see the underlying triumph here – the rare story of two women taking the lead on making the music they wanted, fulfilling their best potential without being chained down by male tastes.
How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful, album #3, is probably their finest glory in this regard – just pure femme rock and roll excellence from beginning to end. Straightaway Ship To Wreck transports you to Florence’s favorite figurative place in the world: caught in a deluge, fighting to keep her head above emotions, buoyed along by a frenetic pop-rock instrumental. What Kind Of Man continues the unabashed drama with imagery of a badly injured Florence “trying to cross a canyon with a broken limb” while her man is “on the other side like always, you could never make your mind.” Wonderful tracks both, but when the brass begins to blast on the chorus of How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful, it’s the telltale sign Isa Machine has finally arrived on production. She mixes the most triumphant tune on the album right away, wherein Florence compares the enormity of her love to the endless blue sky above Los Angeles.
Triumphant is still an understatement for one of two other Isabella joints on the album. Delilah is a beast of a gospel-rock track, and when I first heard it in 2017, I had to take my headphones off for a while and marinate in awe. Florence + the Machine had made a bombastic, exquisitely layered track about a Biblical story I’d never liked, about a traitorous woman who deceived one of God’s favorite guys (Samson) and took away the source of his strength, leaving him to be blinded by his enemies, humiliated, and forced to dance for them. In the lyrics, Florence refers to her uncommunicative male lover as Delilah, already an interesting comparison to make. But not only that, Delilah is also portrayed as perhaps not at fault, and it may be the pain “Delilah” caused was of “Samson’s” (Florence’s) own doing:
Strung up, strung out for your love, hanging, hung up, it’s so rough
I’m wrung and wringing out, why can’t you let me know? …
It’s a different kind of danger and my feet are spinning round
Never knew I was a dancer ’til Delilah showed me how
On first pass, it doesn’t even seem like Delilah did anything bad. You really have to read into that. But this peculiarly feminine-focused, almost gender-blind, grandiose, and slapping reinterpretation of a mean-spirited Old Testament story was and still is so cool. This is the kind of juice that Isabella and Florence make together at their best.
The third and final song with Isa Machine on the album somehow still beats all. Which Witch is perhaps the best track out of the entire Florence + the Machine discography, amid incredibly stiff competition. Which Witch encapsulates everything so great about their music at its best. A soulful anthem, dark, deep, and pulsing with earthy handclaps and foot stomps on the beat, a triumphant line of brass and strings and Florence’s vocals in the role of an alleged witch on trial, vanquishing her persecutors with pure conviction.
I’m not beaten by this yet, you can’t tell me to regret
Been in the dock since the day we met
Fire, help me to forget!
Since I first listened to this song at 20, I’ve played it every time before I defended a thesis, took a major test or interview, or needed to show up for some other intimidating event. This stuff is like a magical girl version of Eye of the Tiger, it gets me that pumped up every time. I feel like I could survive the all the circles of hell, a return journey to Mount Doom, and my 4-hour daily work commute through the divinely-blessed survivor energy of Witch Welch and Isa Magician.
Hanging, hung up, it’s so rough
What we didn’t know then was that one of the most dazzling partnerships in rock-and-roll wouldn’t last forever. By 2018, Isa would not be credited anywhere in the band’s album #4 High As Hope. She still performed as the keyboardist for the world tour through 2019, but afterwards, Isabella disappeared altogether from band performances as well as song credits. Those who became fans in this era, like myself, would easily have missed Isa’s importance as the entire second half of the (original) group.
It’s not that Isabella vanished from the music world – she’s had steady work composing for TV and film in the intervening years. When asked in 2022 whether she’d left Florence + the Machine, given her lack of participation on album #5 Dance Fever and its then-ongoing tour, Isa insisted that she hadn’t. In the same breath, Isa also admitted that she had never discussed with Florence about taking a hiatus, and the super-producer described it as a sort of mutually-understood growing-apart:
I actually didn’t [tell Florence I wouldn’t do the Dance Fever tour]. It was just unspoken. It’s a deep connection we have. We don’t need to, because the love is so real, so sisterly. We’re inked on each other’s souls.
While I trust Isa’s interpretation of the situation, I hope to god they’ve all talked it over by now, since we haven’t heard any more of Summers (not?) being in the band ever since. Florence hasn’t spoken about Isa since she left, which is a little scary and suggests it could have been a messy departure. My good-faith guess for Florence’s silence is being too shy to speak about a friend she’s drifted apart from, unable to explain why she doesn’t know what Isa’s up to, and Florence won’t reach out because it would disrupt a comfortable equilibrium that she’s already attained without Isa in her life… is that too specific?
Isa’s absence is instantly noticeable when you compare High As Hope to the previous albums. I remember thinking upon first listen that the album was so awfully quiet. Most of the tracks are delicate, navel-gazing ballads with minimal instrumentation. Still lovely, if a bit lacking in the ear-worm department. Only the lead single, Hunger, has the energetic rocketing vocals typical of Dog Days Are Over or Shake It Out, if with a still more subdued production. Lyrically, Hunger sounds as though it was written to be down-tempo just like the rest of the album. But Florence decided make an anthem out of it, to everyone’s delight:
Grand self-mythology
Another important theme began to emerge in the post-Summers era of Florence + the Machine. Like never before, hints of resentment began to creep out of Florence’s songwriting, becoming openly reflective about her identity as a woman in the rock genre, and the restrictions placed on her legacy (both personally and professionally). She made the following declaration in King, the lead single for album #5 Dance Fever (2022):
“I am no mother, I am no bride, I am King.”
At the time, I found King a puzzling musical direction. Florence Welch had always made empowering herself beyond patriarchal structures look so effortless – whether by spooking folks with eerie references to her third eye, or casually putting Delilah the icon of womanly faithlessness on a pedestal, or embodying a witch on trial coldly welcoming the flames of her persecutors. She made it look so easy that you could believe that it was possible to be feminine, intuition-driven, and a perhaps a bit outside of the realm of logic without being degraded or lesser in any way (which of course it is – it just takes an idealist to bring it back!). For that reason, this girlboss-adjacent anthem was shocking, and I didn’t like it back then. I can still appreciate it on a musical level, and I understand the theme. To be King alludes to aspirational levels of self-worth and self-determination, for which there’s no literary equivalent.
In any case, Dance Fever was a stellar record, and a clear return to form after High As Hope. With steady assists from indie pop-rock men like Dave Bayley (Glass Animals) and Jack Antonoff, F+tM crafted an alluringly percussive, feverishly-danceable run of tracks, like Free and Choreomania and My Love. Florence returned to her usual naturalistic musical inspirations, like historical plagues and her favorite flowers. A year later the band dropped the excellent single Mermaids, a song about bloodthirsty sea creatures (and drinking like a fish), continuing the trend of the best tracks each era being a random bonus record. I opine that this track was very Isa Machine-coded with its ostentatious horn backing, but based on the credits, Florence Welch conjured up this doom-booming instrumental with only the help of Dave Bayley.
With Dance Fever, it was clear that Florence and the Machine had a core musical identity and creative vision that could survive the departure of even its genius Machine.
Intermission
The last artist I saw at Sportpaleis was another 2000s rock act deep into their career, touring their seventh album. When a rock band gets to a certain number of eras (and band members lost), there is naturally a high chance for the discography to become divisive, and well… Panic! at the Disco was no exception.
I was there in 2023 for the Viva Las Vengeance European tour, to my chagrin even at the time, as I was far from a fan of a record which was giving “The Least Showman” crossed with a bad Queen tribute band. It was sad because I liked Panic. This era, I had gotten so disillusioned that I began to be soured on Panic’s past work, like eleventy-billion record-smashing hit High Hopes, for laying the groundwork for frontman Brendon Urie to screech unmemorable Broadway tunes at the upper limit of his range for two albums in a row.
But so it goes, I’m grateful to have been there anyway, and I was accompanying a fan devoted enough for two: my friend Zo, who has had a (very fair) crush on Brendon for over half her life. Plus, A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out was the first no-skip record of my childhood, back when I was drag-and-dropping bootlegged .mp3s into iTunes and manually changing the punctuation of certain artist names.
At the Viva Las Vengeance tour, I remember an odd sense of disconnectedness that I have not felt at a concert before or since. Much of it was the questionable farewell tour set, wherein the entire new album of 12 songs was played, smack dab in the setlist between all of Panic’s decade-plus-old hits. Viva Las Vengeance, even if you’re generous and really enjoy classic-rock facsimiles, had a commercially unspectacular performance. This made no sense. But so it was, that a bewildered crowd stood around in near-silence for an hour of the show. (My friend Sam, sitting some sections away, even fell asleep during that bit.) Combined with the detached bearing of Brendon Urie – who barely addressed the crowd and never so much as acknowledged the city he was performing in – I was just as checked out. A rousing rendition of I Write Sins Not Tragedies briefly reminded me what I was there for, but I knew now it wasn’t the artist in front of me.
My convoluted point is: debuting as a successful rock act, following up with more critical and commercial success and then being in the spotlight for decades, isn’t guaranteed to end in triumph. Sometimes (maybe more often than not) a member departs and it goes off the rails. The whole project may even end with a whimper. And, I admit this all came uncomfortably to my mind when Florence + the Machine’s album #6 Everybody Scream came out last fall.
Too feminine to function
Before I go into some of the interesting trends in Everybody Scream, I will lead with it being an impressive work of production, lyricism, and vocals, as ever. (I did not mean to imply, no matter how briefly, that it might be comparable to that dud Viva Las Vengeance.)
The title track Everybody Scream is foot-thumpingly fantastic, and serves as a perfect opener for the touring setlist, a direct love letter to fans in the heat of the live show. “Look at me run myself ragged, blood on the stage,” Florence thunders, her robed figure striding across a sea of upraised arms and ecstatic faces, “but how can I leave you when you’re screaming my name?” The sly percussion and breathy strains of Witch Dance tell the intriguing story of Florence’s initiation to wisdom after her harrowing near-death experience. Sympathy Magic embodies the gorgeous maximalism of F+tM at its finest, with Welch’s vocals gliding sinuously around the bass and percussion and strings, before gathering into an earth-shaking belt of wonder at the aching sweetness of being alive. We’re only on track four, but it’s electric so far.
The loss of the plot, in my opinion, begins with Buckle, going immediately from the fifth track Perfume and Milk. The latter is a heavy, heartfelt musing on her body-mind slowly healing from a myriad of aches and grief, after her life-threatening miscarriage. Extremely painful stuff. It is followed awkwardly by this jaunty sadgirl ballad about getting ghosted in a situationship.
It’s not that Florence is above this kind of music. Songs About Getting Ghosted, like Delilah and Big God, are in fact one of her specialties (second only to Songs About Crashing Out In or Next to Water). But just look at this excerpt from Big God in 2018:
You keep me up at night
To my messages, you do not reply…
I still like you the most
You’ll always be my favorite ghost…
Shower your affection, let it rain on me
Don’t leave me on this white cliff
Let it slide down to the, slide down to the sea
And compare it with the chorus of Buckle, from 2026:
I’m stupid and I’m damaged and you’re a disaster
When you walk into the room, oh, none of it matters
Oh, baby, I just buckle, my resolution in tatters
‘Cause I know it won’t work, but make it ache, make it hurt
Keep me a secret, choose someone else
I’m still hanging off the buckle on your belt
In the eight-year interval, Florence went from using relatively artful, natural imagery to describe her experience being neglected by her lover, and towards self-loathing lovelorn lyrics that recall Olivia Rodrigo with the 1.5-entendre wordplay of Taylor Swift. The fact that the song is co-written by that patroness of sad sack music, Mitski, is also unsurprising. Naturally, with such viral musical DNA, Buckle is at least the second most popular song off the album, and Florence herself labels it as the fan favorite.
If I thought Florence’s maturity was in question by deciding to release Buckle, she clearly thought so too, as evidenced by the preamble before the band performed it at the Antwerp show. After jokingly conceding it was no longer cute to be crashing out over situationships at age 39 (musically or otherwise), Florence went on to say she actually planned to leave the song off the album, if not for the positive feedback she’d gotten from industry friends.
That would explain why Buckle is so out of place. I’ll take any bit of self-awareness I can get from an artist I admire a lot, but some songs are best left in the drafts for a future project or one-off single. What did I’m still hanging off the buckle on your belt have to do with this album’s theme of death and resurrection, about screaming because one almost died and then screaming because one survived? Nothing. Even if Buckle is not deliberately pandering to the fragile, whispery indie-pop vogue of this current music era (which I unfortunately think it is), it still feels regressive just in the context of Florence’s own discography – comparing her to no one else.
One other trough of this project is definitely Music By Men. Given the subject matter of the song, it just occurred to me that Florence must have gotten a kick out of naming this mediocre, rambling, relatively low-effort track “Music By Men.” On a meta-level, this song may actually be genius. Many would agree it’s worth diluting one’s discography for the bit.
But even if it’s on purpose, you still have to acknowledge that it’s not a very good song. I’ve alluded to Florence expressing resentment and self-consciousness lately about her legacy as a woman in rock music, how she works the hardest and puts out better records than nearly anybody else but likely still wouldn’t surpass, say, The 1975 on all-time critic ratings. All that spills out gracelessly here.
I know Welch is human, and can and must be messy, and can also certainly diss her musician ex-boyfriend for his self-esteem issues that were plausibly triggered by her formidable talent. It’s just that Music By Men is kind of pedestrian, with a bare acoustic guitar backing that does nothing for Florence’s lightly contemptuous vocals, which in turn can’t quite sell the brittle lyrics. In my opinion. (Also, I don’t like knowing that Florence cares so much about getting good scores on Metacritic. It’s a bit bizarre that she is actually writing music about that.)
The wildest thing is that Florence had also made a far better song sneering about the inability of male listeners (and lovers) to appreciate her artistry, and it is a single from the very same album. Yes, of course, I didn’t forget:
The fittingly named One of the Greats is the best joint on the album. I think it’s simply because the album is called Everybody Scream, and she went and delivered just that. She screamed about damn near giving her life for her music and fans and legacy, performing nightly shows with an ectopic pregnancy back in 2023. She screamed about surviving, but being buried and disregarded anyway as she never fit the mold to be a rock legend. I absolutely love how she claims it. She knows it’s her and always has been, and mixes in a stiff jab at the persistent gatekeeping in the music industry:
I’ve really done it this time, this one is all mine
I’ll be up there with the men and the ten other women
In the hundred greatest records of all time
Objectively, the bars don’t stop there:
It must be nice to be a man and make boring music just because you can
This line is amazing, a real haymaker, and she spits it real nice too. I immediately wondered which male artists she would name when it got right down to it. Then she would mention The 1975 in a later song called “Music By Men,” which is weapons-grade shade coming from Florence Leontine Welch.
Now don’t get me wrong, I’m a fan
You’re my second-favorite frontman
And you could have me if you weren’t so afraid of me
It’s funny how men don’t find power very sexy
So this one’s for the ladies
Do I drive you crazy?
Florence, you’ve always been for the ladies. We were here the whole time. Much as I’m affronted that she implies she’ll settle for pleasing her lady fans now that she figured out men aren’t attracted to her dominance and ambition… this is still badass. And was my pleasure to see it live:
Ultimately it was One of the Greats that inspired me to write this essay, thanks to one of the most interesting lines yet to flow from Florence’s pen. “Too feminine to function.” A poignant phrase for so many women, so many people suffering under gendered expectations. It’s that rebuking voice in our heads put in there so long ago that we don’t even know where it echoes from, and we can’t silence it. Weak. Too emotional. Incompetent. You’ll hurt yourself. You don’t belong here. Don’t even try. Simple yet heartbreaking.
Despite the elegance of it, I couldn’t help but notice this is far from the transcendent artist I first came to love. The Florence of eleven years ago never came close to penning such an bitter, ironic statement about womanhood. It had been one of the most unique charms of Florence + the Machine — that completely radiant feminine confidence. This ability to never second-guess their hyperfeminine subject matter and silky-smooth yet seismic delivery (nearly alien to the pop-rock landscape at the time). Commanding respect because of it, even.
It was kind of inspirational for me, that realization that you could just… live life, not trying to cater to the standard of success that was defined by patriarchal men. You didn’t have to be one of the boys to be cool. I didn’t have to beat myself up and feel like a ditz for getting tongue-tied in conversation or for making a mistake while driving. I didn’t have to resent being encouraged to learn life skills like cooking and washing my own clothes. I’m a person like anybody else, with things I’m good at and interested in, and things I could work to be better at, and things other people can help me with at the end of the day. It is certain that gendered expectations partially shaped how I am, but not entirely. I can just exist and not stress about defying expectations just for the sake of it, and Florence showed me her way of doing that.
F+tM gave such a powerful impression back then, I think, because Florence and Isa were still working together. It must have been easier for Florence to be freely herself, femininity and all, when there was another woman on her level and in her vicinity to make music with. And now, while the production or music quality hasn’t dipped in Isa’s absence, Welch’s confidence in her identity seems to be shaken. It could be to do with growing older and the “vague humiliations of fame,” though I think it’s more obviously due to the fact that she’s now surrounded by male producers all the time in the studio. She must be that rare mainstream female musician who isn’t accustomed to that, having not started out that way.
Florence and the Machine have long made such earnest music, unthinkingly idealistic about loving and feeling deeply, and filled with awe and respect for landscapes and religion and folklore. Lots of things that are not taken that seriously in this genre (at least not in the 21st century) but which have been so important. I’m glad she had this optimism once and gave us her shining example, and I hope she finds it again. I hope that she can be reminded of it, perhaps with a little help from fans, like the tide bringing the love back to her.
I will let the light in, I will let the love in, I will be happy, it will be perfect. ■
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