The instrumentation on opener Everybody Scream is sparse, just drums, bass, and a cackling witch-chorus but it feels huge, as you’re thrust into a shadowy forest, conjuring a whole mythic universe out of little more than Florence’s voice and presence. Since her debut album Lungs, Florence Welch has occupied a musical world populated by the ghosts of the classic literature of Lewis Carroll, C.S. Lewis, ancient folklore and pagan English magic and she’s still lost and spinning through wonderland twenty years later.

The only convincing musical ancestor to this album is White Rabbit by Jefferson Airplane. That was the last time a dark psychedelic folk-horror ballad reached millions of people. Florence Welch has tapped into a niche, ritualistic and esoteric sound and turned it into pop music capable of headlining Reading & Leeds. The tension between the massive icon ‘FLORENCE’ and the fragile human Florence Welch is the emotional engine of the album, with an arena-sized opener designed explicitly to be screamed by a hundred thousand people. Who is pulling her back to the stage? Is it the crowd? The stage? Or her own addiction to this transcendent persona? The whole album wrestles with the unequal burden placed on women in music. The men from her era can just stand still and murmur into a microphone, but Florence bleeds and breaks bones onstage, and the album interrogates that cycle of performance and punishment. Tracks like Sympathy Magic and Kraken are as colossal as anything Arcade Fire could muster at their peak, swelling from trembling and hushed opening verses into sky-splitting explosive finales. Florence Welch is a real person caught in the machinery of icon-making, constantly torn between being a frail woman and an indestructible myth. Dramatic, gothic, breathless, and unmatched.