After Florence Welch came close to death, she felt strongly that, more than people, she wanted to be with plants and animals. “It was a real need to be around things that couldn’t speak, but had a life force or energy to them. I found that the most healing,” she says. Since then, cats have kept coming to visit her garden. Not her cats – it is hard for her to have pets, what with all the touring – but neighbourhood cats, treating the place as if they live there. “I’m not saying anything, but more and more started coming, and foxes,” she says. She sees patterns and prescience in many things, now. “I don’t know. Or maybe I just noticed them more, because that’s what I needed to be around.”

In August 2023, Welch had a miscarriage. Days later, she learned that the pregnancy had been ectopic, meaning that the fertilised egg had implanted in a fallopian tube, rather than the uterus. The fallopian tube then ruptured, causing massive internal bleeding. “The closest I came to making life was the closest I came to death,” she says. “And I felt like I had stepped through this door, and it was just full of women, screaming.”

We are in her summer house, at the end of her lush garden in south London, still blooming, late in the season, in tasteful shades of pastels and white. She sits on the sofa, wearing a long, pale-green gown, wrapped in a shawl. She shifts and reclines, stands up and sits back down. The door is open. The air is brisk. There is a pile of blankets in the corner, she says, in case I get cold. We talk for almost two hours about what happened to her, and how the catastrophe of it all became her extraordinary, excoriating new album, Everybody Scream. The record is as strange, uncompromising and brutal as she has ever been. It will be released on Halloween, and no wonder. It is full of witchcraft and fury.

***

Welch has long been such a fixture of the British music scene that it can be easy to understate how massive she is. When the first Florence + the Machine album, Lungs, came out, she was 22. (We are meeting on the day after her 39th birthday.) She had No 1 singles and albums at home, and she conquered the US, topping the Billboard charts with her third record. When Foo Fighters had to pull out of Glastonbury in 2015, she was bumped up the bill to headliner, a feat so rare for a British woman that, since the turn of the century, only Adele, Dua Lipa and Florence have managed it. Her performance that night made it clear that she was already a headline act.

In 2022, she released a single called King. It was a conversation with herself about whether to have children, or to continue life as a performer. Could the two coexist? It contains the line “I never knew my killer would be coming from within”, and it was the opening track on her fifth album, Dance Fever, which was also partly inspired by a 16th-century phenomenon in which women danced themselves to death. She thought, then, that she had made her horror record. “I really did,” she says, and sighs. “With that naivety … ”

At the end of the summer of 2023, Welch cancelled a handful of festival shows, posting a note to Instagram explaining that she’d had to have emergency surgery, that it had saved her life, but that she didn’t feel strong enough to go into the reasons for it, yet. “Suffice to say I wish the songs were less accurate in their predictions,” she wrote, at the time.

“Having that line in King was a strange thing,” she says, today, her lip beginning to tremble. “Because I had an ectopic pregnancy, on stage.” She talks through what happened, slowly and steadily. Two years ago, she and her boyfriend – a British guitarist in an indie band, whom she prefers not to name, as she is protective of his privacy, but who she has been with, on and off, since 2011 – decided that they would try to have a baby. “It was my first experience of even trying to get pregnant, and I thought, there’s no way, because I’m ancient,” she laughs. She was about to turn 37. She got pregnant the first time they tried. “It was a big shock. But it felt magical, as well. I felt I had followed a bodily instinct, in that animal sense, and it had happened.”

The miscarriage occurred early in the pregnancy, so early that they hadn’t yet told anyone about it. “I think, because it was my first time being pregnant, and it was my first miscarriage, I was like, OK, I’ve heard this is part of it. I spoke to my doctor, and they are not generally dangerous. Devastating, but not dangerous,” she says. She was due to headline a festival in Cornwall a week later, and made the decision to continue with the performance. “Emotionally, I was sad and scared, but I think, also, I was coping.” This sense of pushing through is not unfamiliar to her. A few years ago, she broke her foot on stage, bled everywhere, and still finished the gig before seeking help. (She notes, wryly, that the performance got a 4/5 review.) “With physical stuff, I have a strange, otherworldly strength,” she says. “Emotionally, I’m an absolute nightmare. Literally, will crumble,” she laughs. “But broken bone? Fine. Internal bleeding? Let’s go.”

Ectopic pregnancies, like the one she didn’t yet know she’d had, are not common; according to the NHS, around 1 in 90 pregnancies can be ectopic. If there are complications they can be dangerous. On the day of the show, she was feeling unwell, looked pale, had started to bleed heavily, and was in a considerable amount of pain. Her doctor told her that, although ectopics were rare, she should get checked, just in case, so she made a plan to go for a scan as soon as she was back at home in London. She put on her white lace dress and got ready to perform. “Women! It’s funny. I took some ibuprofen and stepped out on stage.”

There was a storm, and a gale, and there was mud everywhere. “I was in the elements, in the wind and rain, and I just felt something working through me.” The pain disappeared straight away. “And I felt this thing take over, the thing that’s always there, the safe space of performance.” The stage has always been where she feels at her most calm, a place where her chattering brain is finally quiet. “My sister says it might be because everyone’s looking at me. Like, ‘Your most peaceful place is where you’re the fucking centre of attention?’” She laughs. “It’s good, having little sisters.”

It was, she says, an amazing show. On the tour bus back to London, the pain returned, but she woke up the next morning at home and felt fine. Still, she knew she had to get checked over. Before the hospital appointment, she went for a walk and got a coffee. She was so sure that it would be OK that her boyfriend didn’t go with her. “Do you know the fucked-up thing?” she says. “I didn’t want to go for the scan. I thought, I’ve done this show, I’m fine, I can cope. But my doctor’s insistence that I come in saved my life.”

It’s funny that she is so anxious, such a hypochondriac, in everyday life, she says. “Because when something bad really is happening to me, I’m like … ” She gets up off the sofa and marches around the room, breezily, as if she doesn’t have a care in the world. “I think I’m going to be fine!”

During the scan, the doctor paused. “And I started to panic.” Her fallopian tube had ruptured. “I had a Coke can’s worth of blood in my abdomen,” she says. Her boyfriend came immediately. She was told she would need emergency surgery within the hour; in the end, the surgeons couldn’t save the fallopian tube, and it had to be removed. “I tried to run away,” she says, and begins to cry. But, again, this turns into laughter: she had her legs up in stirrups. “I couldn’t go anywhere!” She lies back, puts her legs into the air, and mimes trying to run away. “Then I was so embarrassed that I was causing a fuss.”

That urge to flee sounds primal, I say. “It was animal instinct. Like, run. But there was an [ultrasound wand] inside me and a woman I’d never met before, and I was like, gotta go!” She laughs, and exhales, a long, slow breath out. She had been due to fly to another festival. “If I’d got on that plane, I’d have come off on a stretcher. Or worse.” When she got home from the hospital, she remembers that she howled. “I think the sound that came out of me was like a wounded animal or something,” she says, choking up. “And then, that was that.” She clears her throat. “Ten days later, I was back on stage.”

***

As a child growing up in south London, Welch was anxious and introverted. She found school exhausting, and didn’t want to go. She used her imagination to soothe herself, finding solace in books and fantasy. “I was very interested in the Bible and Greek myths and Goosebumps, anything that could take me out of reality.”

Even the Florence + the Machine origin story was an exercise in imagination, at first. In the mid-00s, many of her friends were in bands, and she would go to indie nights in London, claiming to have a band, too. Drunk in the toilets of a nightclub, she belted out Etta James’s Something’s Got a Hold on Me, for the woman who would go on to become her manager. She got booked for her first gig the next week.

Recently, Welch’s mother, Evelyn, a professor of renaissance studies and vice-chancellor of Bristol University, dropped round a box full of press clippings from the early days to her daughter. “She collected them all from 2009 to 2010, and then she just stopped,” she laughs. She thinks her mother assumed that she would be in the spotlight for a couple of years, and it would end, and she would move on. Opening the box was a strange experience. “I looked like I was being eaten.” When she first rocketed into the spotlight, people were not sure if she was indie or pop. “So I’d have an indie face, but I’d be in high heels and a minidress, with crazy red hair.”

Commercially, Florence + the Machine was a huge success from the beginning, but Welch was pulled into that British cycle of being “lauded and then brought down a peg or two”, as she puts it, particularly in the music press. This was the era of male indie stars in ripped jeans and dirty T-shirts, making as little effort as possible in the pursuit of “authenticity”. “When I was becoming Florence + the Machine, there was a sense that if you are flamboyant, it’s contrivance. Actually expressing your imagination upon yourself and upon your body was inauthentic and attention-seeking, or annoying.” That early backlash was tough. “It made me shrink myself. I was still big on stage and big in my art, but offstage, I made myself smaller.”

On stage, it was always a different story. Last year, she appeared alongside Taylor Swift, twice, as one of the special guests on the blockbuster Eras tour, performing Florida!!!, a song they had written together for Swift’s album The Tortured Poets Department. (In true Welch style, her part was inspired by a short story about a woman riding out a storm in a bathtub, haunted by her dead loved ones, holding a chicken and a bottle of red wine.) How do you get involved in something like that, I ask? “We’ve known each other for a while,” she says. “So she just texted.”

Walking out on to the stage to join Swift was something special. She jumps up off the sofa. “It was amazing,” she says, arms outstretched. “I will say that, yes, I’m someone who wants to hide from the vague humiliations of fame. But I did step out on that stadium stage with her and I was like, this is pretty fucking cool.” She decided that she was going to up her game, stop daydreaming, work harder. “After this, I’m gonna have to make some changes,” she laughs.

In fact, mainstream pop had long ago caught up with Welch. Extravagant self-presentation is much more accepted now, if not the norm. She mentions Ethel Cain and Chappell Roan, both of whom have built careers around a persona. “They are allowed to keep their personal boundaries and create this incredible world and character. It’s amazing. But when I was coming up, if you created a world and a character, it was, like, ‘so contrived’. Now, there’s this celebration of people creating imaginative worlds.”

She has a theory. “People really need worlds to disappear into,” she says. Fandoms are communities, and community is being eroded by phones. “So all these communities build up around artists, and I think people really, really crave it at the moment.” Welch says that Instagram is not good for her personality. She finds it too addictive. So she doesn’t post herself, and tries not to keep the app on her phone.

Even so, she has a healthy knowledge of what her algorithm tries to feed her. “Like, why have I been looking at … raccoons and bardcore?” What, I ask, is bardcore? “It’s … the medieval Gregorian chant algorithm,” she laughs. She is nothing if not self-aware. She recalls seeing a meme that summed her up. “It said, Florence’s songs are either like, ‘and the mountains came down from the wind’ or ‘this guy hasn’t texted me back and I’m drunk’.” What does it feel like to be memed? She smiles. “When they get it right, they get it right. I can’t deny that that’s what it is.”

***

Welch wishes she could do small talk, but she always gets it wrong. “It kills me. I just go in with something huge, it’s terrible.” Someone will stop her in the street and ask her how she is. “Well, I had to have my fallopian tube taken out the other day … ” she jokes. But she is more dry and funny with it than you might expect. “I am grounded,” she insists, then pauses, aware that her assistant has just placed lunch on the table in front of us. “Or as grounded as a famous person can be.” She looks down at her feet and hoots. “I’ve really got my velvet loafers planted firmly on the ground.”

Everybody Scream is the antithesis of small talk. On it, Welch is grappling with a lot. There’s her new song One of the Greats, which she calls her “lunatic, enormous, poem-rant-joke thing”, and offers seething indictment of sexist double standards. In the video, she sits in the back of a limo, at night, in sunglasses and a suit, a rock star waving a cigar (she doesn’t smoke; it’s a liquorice stick). “It must be nice to be a man and make boring music just because you can,” she sings.

That’s a cheeky line, I say. “Yeah,” she laughs. “It’s all quite tongue-in-cheek.” That one is about effort, and how much is required of women, as opposed to men. “You [male performers] get to be up there and be hot in a T-shirt, and everyone’s like, it’s amazing!” With women, it’s different. “Your body is the show, the clothes are the show.” Many of her male peers have three children and continue to tour, “because they have a partner with the kids at home. What I’m sacrificing to keep going is more apparent, and bigger, as you get older.” It is understandable that this is at the front of her mind, though once again the song was prescient: she wrote it before the pregnancy. “I will get those things, hopefully. I will get to have a family, but I haven’t had both. Or so far I haven’t, and then when I tried, I was sort of violently rebuffed,” she sighs.

I don’t want to assume that it’s all autobiography, I say, but … how much of the lyrics are true? What happens, she says, is that she turns the real into the unreal, in order to cope with it. “I’ve shared parts of my life with [fans] that I haven’t been able to say to my closest friends,” she admits. “Addiction, and eating disorders, and whatever the fuck this one’s about.” After the trauma of the ectopic pregnancy and the emergency surgery, she thought that she wanted to put it all away. “But working again helped me. It was like little lanterns in a fog. I could just pick my way through. And I was so angry! There was a fury at how unsupported I felt by my industry, how clear it was, that it wasn’t built for me.”

In trying to understand what happened to her, she began to explore the history of witchcraft. In the folk horror-ish video for the album’s first single, also called Everybody Scream, she commands a group of women who possess everyone they meet. On another song, Sympathy Magic, she explores going to a wise woman for a spell, in the same way that one might have gone to a priest for a prayer.

She is aware of how all this sounds. “Modern medicine absolutely saved my life,” she says, “but you can’t go anywhere about birth without finding witchcraft and magic and medicine. Some of the first people tried as witches were midwives.” She saw a healer, whom she refers to lightly as “the womb witch”, a woman who helped Welch with her hormones and her natural cycles, who guided her through rituals of grief.

For the album, she did her research and holed up in the Warburg Institute, a library in London that specialises in medieval and renaissance studies. Her reference points zigzag from Buffy the Vampire Slayer to Rosemary’s Baby, to medieval mystics such as Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe.

Did she feel changed by her brush with death, by the possibility of having not gone for the scan? We talk about one of the myths of experiencing something traumatic – that you are no longer supposed to sweat the small stuff, that you are supposed to move forward with a compulsion to seize the day. “It hasn’t happened,” she says. “I feel slightly more obsessive and fragile and wounded than I did before. But it has given me a sense of toughness in my work.”

On another new song, called Music By Men, Welch makes a plea: “Let me put out a record and not have it ruin my life.” In the past, she and her boyfriend always seemed to break up when she released an album, she explains. “I felt like I couldn’t have both. Or something would happen that would blow up my personal life. So there was a sadness of why did that happen to me? Why do I have this record, if I didn’t get to have a kid?”

After an ectopic pregnancy, there is a greater risk of it happening again. IVF might be the safer option, but right now they are waiting and seeing. “Once the record is out, you get this burst of energy that compels you to make something, and either that is a record or maybe this time, it’ll be something else.” In times of stress, Welch goes back to Buffy. She is rewatching it right now. “Seasons six and seven are incredible television,” she says. “I will do my Ted Talk on it.”

She often finds the business of being Florence + the Machine exhausting. “There’s a feeling of dying a little bit, every time I make a record,” she says. “And, this time, I nearly died.” With every album, she says, she is trying to get it right. “Did I get it perfect? Is it good enough? Will I be satisfied? Will you be satisfied?” She is still afraid that she won’t be taken seriously, a hangover, perhaps, from those early days in the spotlight. Now that Everybody Scream is about to be released, she is wondering if she will finally be happy. She is still not sure. “It’s the Martha Graham quote,” she says, meaning the late US dancer and choreographer. “It’s the ‘divine dissatisfaction’ that keeps you going.”

• Everybody Scream by Florence + the Machine is out on 31 October on Polydor Records