There’s a moment about two minutes into “Sympathy Magic” where Florence Welch’s voice cracks just slightly on the word “safe,” and it’s the kind of imperfection that tells you everything. This isn’t studio polish. This is someone still working through something that nearly killed them.
August 2023. Dance Fever tour. Florence Welch got pregnant almost immediately after she and her boyfriend decided to try for a baby.
What should have been a beginning turned into an ectopic pregnancy, her fallopian tube ruptured, internal bleeding, the closest she’d ever come to death.
She performed through it at a Cornwall festival, popped some ibuprofen, stepped on stage bleeding and in agony because that’s what you do when you’re a woman and a professional.
A doctor’s insistence on a scan saved her life. Days later, emergency surgery, one fallopian tube gone, and Florence stepped through what she called a door “full of women, screaming.”
Everybody Scream (out 31 October via Polydor/Republic Records) grew from that rupture, and “Sympathy Magic” is where she stops trying to make sense of it and just lets it be what it is: fury, pain, power, ritual.
What the Lyrics Actually Say
Memory fails, faces blur, there’s only before and after. The opening verse doesn’t waste time easing you in. This is the trauma split we all know if we’ve been through something that divides your life in two.
“The scar fades but pulls inside / Tugging at me all the time” because physical scars are the easy part. She’s chewing on a feeling and spitting it out, unable to digest it, unable to let it go.
Then: “Crouched in a ball gown / Anxious and ashamed / The vague humiliations of fame.”
She performed through miscarriage in a ball gown. The image does the work. Ornate, beautiful costume, body in crisis underneath. The professional mask costs something nobody talks about.
The chorus abandons any attempt at making this palatable. “I do not find worthiness in virtue / I no longer try to be good / It didn’t keep me safe / Like you told me that it would.”
Women get sold this story constantly: be good enough, worthy enough, deserving, and you’ll be protected. Florence did everything right and her body still tried to kill her. So virtue becomes this useless currency, and she’s done with it.
“So come on, tear me wide open / A terrible gift / Let the chorus console me / Sympathy magic.” Not a request. A dare. If being good doesn’t protect you, try the old magic instead. The dangerous kind.
Second verse shifts the whole temperature. “And light coming in the window just so / And the wind through my fingers / The only God that I know.”
After nearly dying, she’s found something more reliable than prayers or promises. Just the wind. Just the light. Things that exist without demanding anything from you.
“And it does not want me on my knees to believe / Head high, arms wide / Aching, aching, aching.” Still in pain, notice that. But upright.
The repetition of “aching” pounds home that this isn’t some triumphant recovery narrative where suffering makes you stronger or whatever. It just makes you ache.
The bridge goes full throttle: “So come on, come on, I can take it / Give me everything you got / What else? What else? What else? What else?”
If you caught the Tonight Show performance, you know exactly what this sounds like live. She’s not asking anymore. She’s survived the worst thing, so bring whatever’s next. I can take it.
Dessner + Harle Shouldn’t Work But Does
Aaron Dessner from The National, known for moody indie-folk. Danny L. Harle, who usually lives in hyperactive PC Music pop territory. On paper, disaster. In practice, they’ve built exactly the kind of unstable ground this song needs.
Starts delicate. Piano, strings, those Florence harp flourishes that signal you’re in for something. But there’s a pulse underneath from the first note, something trying to break through.
When it finally crashes open in the chorus, the restraint ends. Orchestration swells, beats hammer in, and Welch’s voice becomes this thing the production has to physically contain or else it’ll blow the whole track apart.
The bridge goes full maximalist. Choirs, percussion, everything at once, before that repeated “Sympathy magic” mantra turns almost trance-like. It’s ritual music, which tracks perfectly given what Welch is trying to do here: turn trauma into spell, pain into power.
The Title Means Something Specific
“Sympathy magic” comes from anthropology and folklore. It’s the idea that you can affect reality through symbolic action. Voodoo dolls. Burning effigies. Any ritual where you’re trying to change the world through representation rather than direct force.
For Welch, it’s turning the thing that nearly destroyed her into performance. The song itself becomes the spell. By singing it, by screaming it out on stage, she’s transforming the experience. Not just surviving. Taking control of the narrative, making it do something else.
Autumn de Wilde’s Clifftop Coven
Director Autumn de Wilde has been Florence’s visual collaborator for years now, and she directed that 2020 Emma adaptation everyone loved.
The video for “Sympathy Magic” opens with Florence standing naked on a clifftop (tastefully NSFW), looking out over a massive landscape.
Four other women join her, styled like Teddy Girls, those rebellious 1950s teens who wore Victorian cast-offs with oversized jackets.
Choreographer Ryan Heffington understands how to make movement work for camera rather than stage, and it shows.
The whole thing feels windswept. They’re not performing for an audience. They’re performing with each other, this witch gang who gets it. De Wilde set this in the highlands for a reason.
This needed space, needed air, needed Florence to literally stand at the edge and scream and have the landscape just absorb it.
What People Are Saying
Fans online are calling it her rawest work since 2011’s Ceremonials, which matters because Ceremonials is the album people still use as the benchmark for Florence at her most unguarded.
One comment that keeps circulating: “Florence really said let me heal humanity and the universe with my otherworldly talent.” Bit dramatic maybe, but also not entirely wrong?
The Tonight Show performance hit differently because you could see it. Barefoot, arms wide, giving absolutely everything to a song about almost dying. The performance and the lived experience become inseparable.
Everybody Scream drops Halloween (perfect timing for an album about resurrection), with collaborators including Mitski, IDLES’ Mark Bowen, and Aaron Dessner. It’s Florence assembling her coven.
The album explores womanhood, mortality, partnership, aging, all filtered through that brush with death and her subsequent deep dive into what she calls “spiritual mysticism, witchcraft and folk horror.”
“Sympathy Magic” is the third single after the title track and “One of the Greats.” Based on what we’ve heard so far, this album isn’t about recovering gracefully or finding silver linings. It’s about what happens when you refuse to be grateful just for surviving.
Because that’s the thing about this song that makes it different from Florence’s usual big feelings. It’s not emotional pain. It’s physical survival.
It’s about your body becoming the site of trauma, about performing through catastrophic medical events because that’s what women do, and then the aftermath when you’re done pretending any of it was fine.
The song rejects the whole narrative that near-death experiences are supposed to make you appreciate life more or become enlightened or whatever.
Welch came back angry. Powerful. Done with virtue and worthiness and all the currency that didn’t actually buy her safety when she needed it. She’s choosing the old magic, the messy kind, the kind that doesn’t ask permission.
Female pain gets packaged in music as either empowerment anthems or quiet suffering. “Sympathy Magic” offers something else: fury as healing, ritual as recovery, screaming as the way you survive.
You might also like:
- Florence + The Machine — “One Of The Greats” (lyrics, meaning & review)
- Florence + The Machine — “Everybody Scream” (lyrics & meaning)
- “Dog Days Are Over” by Florence + The Machine — how a hangover inspired a song of hope and freedom
- Mitski — “My Love Mine All Mine” (lyrics: deep dive)
- The Last Dinner Party — “Count The Ways” review
- Taylor Swift — “The Fate of Ophelia” (lyrics meaning & review)