There’s a moment midway through “Music by Men” where Florence Welch admits she slides down in her seat on the way to couples therapy so she won’t threaten her partner’s ego.
It’s the kind of detail that makes you physically uncomfortable because it’s so specific, so small, and so absolutely devastating.
Released 31 October 2025 as part of Everybody Scream, the song arrives in the shadow of Welch’s near-fatal 2023 ectopic pregnancy; a turning point she’s described as “a spiritual and physical reckoning that changed the way I write about being alive.”
Music by Men isn’t just another Florence anthem; it’s the sound of someone re-negotiating the intensity she once wore like armour.
This isn’t the Florence of “Dog Days Are Over“ or even the Florence of “Hunger.” This is someone who has realised that all the theatrical intensity in the world can’t save you from the boring, grinding work of actually being with another person.
Co-written with Mark Bowen and produced alongside Aaron Dessner, “Music by Men” is the quietest song Florence has released in years.
When an artist known for cathedral-sized choruses and maximum drama strips everything back to near-whispers and open space, she’s found something she doesn’t want to dress up.
Desert Standoffs and 3am Confessions
The production is a Spaghetti Western standoff, the empty desert stretching between a trembling acoustic guitar and the ghost of a drum.
Aaron Dessner’s restraint creates space that forces you to hear every word. Notes from her partner falling out of books. Pushing love away. Listening to demos in silence because no one can stand to speak.
“I know how to fall in love, I do it constantly / I fall in love with everyone I meet for ten minutes at least / Then comes the work, the resentments, and the hurt / Picking at your haircut and that stupid band t-shirt.”
Falling in love is dopamine and projection and the brief delusion that this person might finally be the one who gets it.
Staying in love means watching someone pick their teeth at breakfast and choosing them anyway.
Welch openly admits compromise is “a brand new concept that I never tried.”
The second chorus shifts one word. “Constantly” becomes “easily.” Even the act of falling feels exhausting now.
When You’re the Problem
Welch gets bored when things require “practice and dedication.” She has a bigger ego than she likes to think.
She makes herself smaller to avoid conflict. She’s looked in the mirror long enough to see the full picture, and she’s reporting back without asking for sympathy.
How many pop songs are written from the perspective of someone who knows they’re difficult to love and doesn’t have a plan to fix it?
Most breakup songs need a villain. This one just has two tired people who can’t figure out how to exist in the same car without headphones.
The pre-chorus offers the closest thing to hope: “Let it be us, let it be home / Falling asleep and not looking at our phone.”
No fireworks. Just the everyday choice to be present, to not scroll, to not escape.
But Welch has made a career out of being larger than life. She has built her entire artistic identity on intensity, on excess, on feelings so big they require orchestras and choirs to contain them.
What happens when you’ve spent your whole life running toward intensity and you finally realise that love, the sustainable kind, requires you to be still?
The 1975 and the Joke That’s Not Really a Joke
“Breaking my bones, getting four out of five / Listening to a song by The 1975 / I thought, ‘Fuck it, I might as well give music by men a try.’”
That lyric has already sparked headlines and think pieces across The Standard and social media, with fans dissecting whether it’s shade or homage. But the real story, as Welch clarified in her Rolling Stone interview, is far more casual and funnier.
When asked which 1975 song she was listening to, she laughed and sang, “We’re f*cking in a car / Shooting heroin / Saying controversial things …” before confirming it was “Love It If We Made It.”
“I was like, ‘This song is really good,’” she said. “A big thing with songwriting is it’s often because it rhymes. So you needed a band that rhymed with ‘five.’”
It’s such a Florence response: self-aware, irreverent, and quietly sharp. The line works as both a wink and a sigh, a moment of humour from someone long scrutinised through a male critical lens.
The “four out of five” lyric nods to album review culture, the kind of near-perfect critical approval that never quite feels like enough.
And while the lyric lands as a joke, it also reveals an exhaustion beneath it, the sense of someone who’s spent years measured by standards she never agreed to in the first place.
Beyond the wordplay, “Music by Men” unfolds into something deeper. The title track might appear to be about romance with men, yet its final confession hints otherwise.
“Running back to the only love I could ever control.” That’s not about a boyfriend. It’s about the work, the art.
Music, unlike love, can be mastered. It can be rewritten, replayed, and, crucially, it will not flinch under your intensity.
What Stays Unresolved
The song loops back to “the only love I could ever control,” which means that despite the therapy, the self-awareness, the desire to change, she’s still not sure she can.
Someone standing at the edge of change, admitting they don’t know if they can jump.
Florence has always written about big emotions. Ceremonials was gothic drama. How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful processed a breakup in real time. High as Hope tried on sobriety.
But “Music by Men” is her first song about the ordinary failures of trying to be a person someone else can live with.
No mysticism, no mythology. Just the grim reality of realising you’re difficult to love and you don’t know how to fix it.
Other tracks from Everybody Scream, like “Drink Deep” and “The Old Religion”, wrestle with artistic identity versus personal fulfillment, but this one refuses to let itself off the hook, instead, it welcomes the discomfort.
Sometimes you can see the pattern clearly and still not know how to break it.
Sometimes you want to stop running and you still don’t know how to stay.
After a career built on grand gestures, the most radical act for Florence Welch isn’t a scream, but a silence held for just a beat too long.
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