Florence + The Machine’s “One Of The Greats” is a hand on the heart and a dare to keep going. It arrives as a stark companion to the forthcoming album Everybody Scream, due on 31 October 2025, with a stripped official visualizer that leaves nothing between Florence Welch and the words.
The title sounds like a boast, but the song wears it like a question. Welch has called it “a long poem about the cost of greatness,” and the performance bears that out: she wrote it in one sitting with IDLES’ Mark Bowen, singing straight from the page while he played guitar, then later expanded the first take with Aaron Dessner so the ending feels like it comes apart by design.
The song encapsulates the toll of chasing standards you can’t quite touch, right down to wanting the final moments to feel like you are disintegrating, which is how she says the process sometimes feels.
The lyrics itself is blunt and earthly: “I crawled up from under the earth / broken nails and coughing dirt / spitting out my songs so you could sing along.”
It captures the feeling of survival without gloss, a crawl back to daylight with a tune clenched in the teeth.
Later refrains turn to the need to prove and be seen, asking who gets to decide what counts as “great” and whether the pursuit is worth the blood and breath it takes.
That ties to the wider chapter she has described since the album was announced, a period shaped by recovery after a life-threatening emergency on the Dance Fever tour and a renewed obsession with the big, messy themes that shadow a body that has been tested.
On the ear it stays taut and human. You can hear the one-take origin in the phrasing, slight rushes at the seams and a voice that gets grainier as the song climbs.
Dessner’s hand shows in the way the arrangement opens and then unwinds, a steady pulse under guitar lines with live-room bite, stacked vocals that thin to threads at the close.
It is dramatic but not in the sense of being grandeur, rather, it’s a controlled spiral that matches the lyric’s argument that creation can feel like dying and returning in the space of four minutes.
As a single it works because the hook is a mirror rather than a banner. “One Of The Greats” becomes less a claim than a test: did I get it right, did I earn the prize, do you regret bringing me back to life?
That ambiguity is the emotional core that deepens what One Of The Greats” is about. The visualiser complements the theme and helps the words carry through.
The album is nailed down for Halloween, with collaborators named and the campaign already rolling. If the title track sketched the frame for Everybody Scream, this one fills it with breath and doubt.
What stays with you is the balance of grit and grace. The song acknowledges the bargain that art demands and still chooses to sing, which is why it reads as both confession and invitation.
Taken as a whole, “One Of The Greats” is a clear win: rooted in raw process, sharpened just enough to travel, and pointed straight at the album’s bigger questions about ambition, survival and what it costs to keep your name in the light.