Florence + the MachineMarlay Park, Dublin★★★★★Four songs into Florence + the Machine at Marlay Park, people begin to act strangely. Girls ascend to the shoulders of boys, creating that most terrifying of gig creature: the two-headed vision-blocker with a trance-like obliviousness to those in their wake. What kind of sorcery is this? The Florence Welch kind.“Would anyone like to make an offering? Would anyone like to be an offering?” she asks as she introduces early-career delight Rabbit Heart (Raise It Up). If you simply must be sacrificed in a folk-horror ritual, you would want this fluttering triumph to be the soundtrack.The shoulder-dwellers soon return to earth with us mere mortals, her spell broken, but Welch has long leant into a witch aesthetic and this incitement – along with a choreographic sequence in which she appears to have murdered her dancers – hints at the possibility that she might not always use her powers for good.Seventeen years on from the release of Lungs, her debut album, Welch remains an artist born for the largest of stages. She might press her palms against the air as if trapped behind a pane of glass, but her vocals are unconfined, and they resonate across the summer evening air with an oaky richness few can match.She arrives as the choral eeriness of Everybody Scream, the title track of her 2025 album, is supplanted by thumping percussion. “I’ll make you sing for me, I’ll make you scream,” she announces via its lyrics, then closes her eyes as if communing with the god of live performance.The record – written after a miscarriage and an undetected ectopic pregnancy that required life-saving surgery – yields four of the 17 songs in her set, and they’re all emotional and musical standouts on a night with no let-downs, no missteps, no faff.She dedicates Buckle to “anyone out there currently being ghosted”, sweetly sharing her vulnerability with the crowd, and relishes both a snarl and a wink on One of the Greats, which sees her blasting her “second favourite frontman” and suggesting – credibly – that he might be afraid of her. “It’s funny how men don’t find power very sexy / So this one’s for the ladies,” she sings, eliciting mass cheers.But the fiercest song is Sympathy Magic. An archetypal Florence number, it shows off her delicate side before proceeding to a raw and glorious howl. As its artillery of synths dies down, she descends to an overwrought front row, her unadorned voice juxtaposing with their disbelief. “Come on, come on, I can take it / Give me everything you got / What else, what else, what else, what else,” she demands in a visceral rendition of the most trauma-infused cut from Everybody Scream.[ Getting to and from Marlay Park concerts: ‘The ticket was €80 ... the taxi home was €70’Opens in new window ]It’s a special moment, but then it never takes much for Welch to transcend a choir-mistress-gone-rogue vibe and fully embody the persona of a flame-haired, barefooted high priestess equipped with lacy power-sleeves, a coterie of suspenders-flashing Gothic zombie dancers and something to say.Midway through Dog Days Are Over, the penultimate song, she invites the compliant audience to put their phones away so they can jump. So medieval, Florence, but respect – the final chorus is absolutely heaving, and the ensuing frenzy caps a bewitching night by a timeless performer whose rapture is infectious.