Young women across America are meeting at the crossroads between feminist power and pain featured in a controversial tour underway, headlined by Florence + The Machine and featuring their latest album, Everybody Scream. It asks the right questions about life, but the answers are all wrong — and profoundly spiritual.
The title track, “Everybody Scream,” reads like a kind of liturgy. “Everybody dance, everybody sing … everybody scream.” This is not just a concert. It is a congregation, with lead vocalist Florence Welch becoming the priest and offering “blood on the stage.” At the center of it all: “the witchcraft, the medicine, the spells, and the injections … protect me from evil.” She names the tools. She names the fear. But she never finds the answer.
To Welch, this is not just edgy music. It’s her theology — or, more accurately, what Carrie Gress, in Something Wicked, calls a “shadow church.” It’s a belief system where autonomy has replaced God, and ritual replaces truth. And young women are listening.
Welch’s album serves as a compelling case study of the modern feminist woman — filled with grief, mystical language, and an unmistakable sense of longing she doesn’t try to hide. The album was inspired, perhaps compelled, by her decision in her late 30s to step back from constant touring to pursue a family, only for that longing to end in the loss of her child and a near-fatal ectopic pregnancy. It’s pain she expresses hauntingly, but answers are lacking.
In press interviews, Welch has described looking everywhere for meaning and finding “stories of witchcraft,” eventually buying a literal cauldron and turning to ritual and magical practices to process her grief. When no one could explain her suffering, she sought control through spirituality rooted not in transcendence but in self-definition.
That worldview saturates the album. Songs like “Sympathy Magic,” “Witch Dance,” and “The Old Religion” are filled with language of spells, altars, ancestral planes, and a reimagined “God.” This is not a casual metaphor. It’s a spiritual framework, one where ritual replaces truth, and the self becomes the ultimate authority. It is, in effect, a new “old religion.”
But it is a religion with a fatal flaw: It places self at the center of the universe. It suggests we can define reality through the sheer force of our will.
Yet the album itself exposes the emptiness of that promise because running through every song is a competing desire that refuses to go away — the desire to be loved, chosen, pursued, and protected.
Welch sings, “It must be nice to be a man and make boring music just because you can,” but then confesses, almost in the same breath, “You could have me if you weren’t so afraid of me, it’s funny how men don’t find power very sexy.” She adds, “I made a thousand people love me, now I’m all alone.”
This is the central contradiction of modern feminism. Women are told they must be powerful, untouchable, and entirely self-sufficient. That everything they want depends on total control over their bodies, their futures, even their spirituality. But the human heart doesn’t cooperate with that script.
Even in “Music by Men,” where she critiques relationships and the male ego, she admits something most feminist narratives avoid: “I know how to fall in love … but then comes the work.” Love, she realizes, is not effortless. It requires compromise, discipline, and endurance — virtues the modern feminist framework often treats as oppressive. “We discussed something called compromise, a brand-new concept that I never tried.”
By every cultural metric, Florence Welch is a success story. But the music doesn’t feel triumphant. She has fame, influence, freedom, and a platform that shapes millions of young women. If autonomy and achievement were enough to produce happiness, she should be its pinnacle.
Instead, her work reveals something else: a culture that celebrates women’s productivity and success that often abandons them in moments of suffering. No amount of power can resolve grief. No level of self-expression can answer the question of why we suffer.
For many young women today, especially those raised without religious grounding, that search is increasingly turning toward spiritual experimentation, including the occult, the “old church.” Not because it’s edgy, but because it offers something modern culture stripped away: ritual, meaning, and a sense of control in the face of chaos.
This raises an uncomfortable question: Is this growing fascination with “witchcore” just aesthetic, or is it evidence that our secular culture is failing to satisfy?
That “old church” has its limits. Fr. Robert Spitzer describes four levels of happiness: pleasure, achievement, love and contribution, and ultimately transcendence. Modern feminism, with its focus on autonomy and self-definition, has kept women cycling between the first two, pleasure and ego, while leaving them unequipped to reach the deeper fulfillment found in love, sacrifice, and meaning beyond the self. Welch’s latest album illustrates this perfectly. It reaches, desperately, for something more but never quite arrives.
If women today have more opportunities, more autonomy, and more power than any generation before them, why are so many still searching? If you spent any time on a college campus or scrolling social media as I do, or just sat at a family dinner table, you’ll notice something unmistakable: Young women are not OK.
They are more anxious, more depressed, more politically radicalized, and, perhaps most tellingly, unsure whether they even want marriage or motherhood. At the same time, young men are moving in the opposite direction, creating a growing cultural divide that feels impossible to ignore.
We need more — a culture where women are not just seen as capable but protected. Not just successful but supported. Not just expressive but loved. The tragedy is not that Welch is searching for hope and a future. The tragedy is where she has been told to look.
