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Review and setlist: Florence + The Machine delivered a dark, intimate Boston show
Florence + The Machine’s rescheduled Boston stop traded arena spectacle for bare feet, huge vocals, and striking intimacy.
Florence + The Machine at TD Garden, Boston, April 20, 2026.
The show date may have shifted, but the mood never did.
By the time Florence + The Machine took the stage Monday night, TD Garden had already taken on Florence Welch’s shape. White flowy skirts, shawls, and flower crowns filled the crowd, with fans dressed for the kind of romantic drama Florence + The Machine has always inspired.
The Boston date had been bumped from Sunday to Monday because of the NBA playoffs, but once the arena filled in, the reschedule felt like little more than a footnote.
Opener Sofia Isella helped set the tone early. Performing alone, she kept things simple: oversized clothes, raw vocals, and no extra production to hide behind. For plenty of people who likely walked in unfamiliar with her music, she made an immediate impression. It was a simple performance, but an effective one.
Big vocals, little excess
Then came Florence.
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At 8:40 p.m. on the dot, smoke began to roll across the stage. Welch emerged slowly through it in a flowing green dress, barefoot, her sleeves nearly brushing the floor. It was a striking first image, and a clear signal of what kind of show this would be.
For an arena performance, Florence + The Machine did not come to TD Garden with an overbuilt production. There were no costume changes, no elaborate production tricks, and no sense that anything was being covered up by spectacle.
Instead, there were four dancers, coined Welch’s “witch choir,” a suspended row of lights, a haze of smoke, some haunting visuals, and Welch’s voice doing the heavy lifting. The result was eerie, elegant, and far more intimate than a room that size should have allowed.
Dark turns and quieter moments
That stripped-down approach suited Everybody Scream, the band’s latest album and the title of the tour.
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The record feels darker and more exposed than much of the band’s earlier work, rooted in grief, longing, womanhood, rage, and survival. On Monday, those themes shaped not just the newer songs, but the entire show. Older favorites were woven in without making the night feel like a nostalgia run. Instead, the set traced the same themes Welch has been referencing for years.
Early on, “Shake It Out” turned TD Garden into one giant choir, with the crowd taking over much of the chorus. But the mood shifted quickly. Soon after, the lights went blood red, the dancers dropped low, crawling across the stage, and the performance moved into something darker and more ritualistic. That contrast defined much of the performance. One minute it felt soft and open. The next, ominous and intense.
Some of the night’s strongest moments came when the production fell away. A long harp prelude before “Cosmic Love” hushed the arena. Later, when Welch moved to the barricade, the mood remained strikingly gentle. Rather than giving way to the usual frenzy that often comes with those crowd-facing moments, she slowed everything down — holding fans’ hands, meeting their eyes, pressing her forehead to theirs, and pausing to hug people who were visibly crying. In a room built for distance, it was one of the night’s most intimate moments.
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That intimacy carried into Welch’s banter, too. She can seem almost consumed by the music while singing, so it was a little startling — and very charming — whenever she paused to speak and suddenly came across as shy, funny, and slightly awkward.
She even joked about the contrast herself: “Singing is like being enchanted by something and then when I have to speak it’s like the real person has stepped in the room.” It got one of the night’s warmest laughs because it rang so true.
Before “Never Let Me Go,” Welch shared that she’d once sworn she would never sing the song again, sharing it reminded her of being “very young and drunk and under a lot of pressure.”
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When someone in the crowd shouted, “Why?” she laughed: “Oh my God, I don’t want to get into it too deep.” But, she said, fans never gave up on “Never Let Me Go.” They kept requesting it, and over time, she came to hear it less as a painful reminder of one chapter in her life and more as a song shaped by what she and her audience had lived through together.
The final stretch
Before the encore, a message on screen noted that the North American leg of the Everybody Scream tour is donating $1 from every ticket sold to Doctors Without Borders, a fitting detail for a show centered on pain, healing, and connection.
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When Welch returned, she did so at ground level, again slipping past the barricade before the encore opened up. “One of the Greats” gently reset the room. Then “Dog Days Are Over” blew it open.
Before starting, Welch asked the crowd to put their phones away. She did not care about capturing the moment, she said. She cared about people being in it. And so they did.
What followed was the liveliest moment of the night. TD Garden jumped, screamed, and danced with a kind of full-body abandon that the show’s more restrained, spell-like mood had mostly kept in check until then. For one of the only times all night, the crowd stopped trying to document the moment and just lived inside it.
“Free” kept the room in motion, its restless energy landing especially well that late in the night, before Welch eased the show into something softer with “And Love.” Introducing the final song, she spoke about music the way this era of Florence + The Machine seems to see it — as prayer, as spell, as something that might help summon a better future. “If songs are prayers or spells,” she said, “let this be the one that comes true.”
After a night spent moving through grief, darkness, fury, and release, Welch chose to end on something softer. Closing the night with “And Love” and its repeated promise that “peace is coming,” Florence + The Machine sent Boston out on a gentle, hopeful note.
Setlist for Florence + The Machine at TD Garden, April 20, 2026:
- Everybody Scream
- Witch Dance
- Shake It Out
- Seven Devils
- Big God
- Daffodil
- Which Witch
- Cosmic Love
- Spectrum
- Never Let Me Go
- Perfume and Milk
- Buckle
- King
- The Old Religion
- Howl
- Heaven Is Here
- Sympathy Magic
- One of the Greats
- Dog Days Are Over
- Free
- And Love
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