Words by Georgia Evans
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A scream of excitement cuts through the air. Florence Road have just learned that when they opened for Wolf Alice on their 2025 European tour, their idols were not only watching their sets from side-stage – but even told NME that they were learning from the Irish newcomers’ performances. For a band who say they feel comfortable with their speedy ascent, the reaction is brilliantly unfiltered.
“A bit of a brain melter,” frontwoman Lily Aron laughs. “As confident as we feel, we’re still new at this whole thing. So it’s amazing to hear that. They’re artists that we’ve listened to for a long time.”
The four-piece from Bray, County Wicklow – Aron, bassist Ailbhe Barry, drummer Hannah Kelly and guitarist Emma Brandon – have gone from filming covers in Aron’s garden shed to supporting the likes of Olivia Rodrigo and Wolf Alice, and landing a spot in the NME 100 of 2026 along the way.
It’s easy to see why Florence Road are drawing that kind of attention. Their songs balance vulnerability with volatility, moving from soft-focus indie intimacy into explosive emotional release without warning, in a vein similar to that of tourmates Wolf Alice and Rodrigo, or even grunge pioneers Hole. Combine that with the instinctive chemistry that comes from growing up together, and the result is a burgeoning group of artists whose live shows feel both meticulously connected and completely unfiltered.
When NME catches up with them, they are midway through a US tour opening for The Last Dinner Party, huddled together in a tour bus, half-watching Grey’s Anatomy, half-trying to remember which city they woke up in that morning.
From the outside, it looks like Florence Road (Flo Ro to their fans) have experienced a surge in hype, but for the group, it’s their hard work finally paying off. “It still feels like an incline at a pace that we’re ready for,” Aron says. “We’re hungry for everything.” Bassist Ailbhe Barry agrees: “I also try not to listen to [the hype] too much. I’m in it for the love of the game.”
You can hear that passion in their music, from the moments of confessional intimacy to the rip-roaring rock-outs. The song ‘Heavy’ slowly stretches out before tearing open in the chorus. The hazy indie riffs of ‘Break The Girl’ give way to a biting hook, as Aron repeats “You break the girl and take the pearl” over bouncing melodies. “That urge to match prettiness with a more intense kind of screaming energy has always been something that I wanted to do in music,” she explains. The juxtaposition makes for an invigorating live show, too. “I just love surprising people,” she adds. “You can see it at the concerts when they don’t know the song, and then suddenly it gets really loud.”
“We’re hungry for everything” – Lily Aron
In 2025, before the sold-out rooms and festival slots, and with just one original song out, the band posted a cover of Paramore’s ‘Hard Times’, filmed in their now-mythologised shed on a 0.5 zoom setting, the phone flash flicking between faces. The video now has around 52million views and 7million likes – which, as is often the case, arrived by accident. “It was five minutes to film,” Aron shrugs. “We posted it, we didn’t think anything of it.” What followed was the double-edged reality of sudden visibility – a wealth of new listeners paired with the trepidation of being flattened into a single internet narrative, especially as they’d only released one song at that time.
Thankfully, “that fear of being perceived as a TikTok band has kind of dissipated,” drummer Hannah Kelly says. “We hadn’t done as many live shows [then]. Now we feel a lot more secure.” This sense of security is founded on something far less fickle than the online hype: real, long-term friendship. Florence Road formed in 2019, all four members pals at Coláiste Ráithín, an Irish-language secondary school on the street that gave the group their name.
They’re now in their early twenties, but they still have the adolescent gang energy you’d expect: they laugh over each other, throw out inside jokes, and speak to one another with an effortless rhythm. Aron and Kelly naturally take the lead, Barry cuts in with sharp observations, while Brandon quietly fires off jokes to the others beside her, each one setting the group off laughing again. It feels instinctive and stable – essential for surviving the speed of what’s happening to them now.
That same dynamic shapes how they write songs. “There’s no ego,” Aron says simply. “We’re all in it to get to the end goal of a great song.” Most of the time, it starts with a spontaneous melody, turn of phrase, or half-finished thought. “There’s not one particular way to write a song,” Aron says, “which I think is very fun, because we never know when it’s going to appear.” Barry, sitting to her left, picks up her point: “There’s a subconscious element. You’ll just be saying things, and someone’s like, ‘Write that down.’ And you realise, ‘That’s what’s been in my head.’”
One of their most popular songs, ‘Heavy’, captures the feeling of old heartache that seems to get worse with every day, like a festering wound. Closing their debut EP, ‘Fall Back’, it’s a slow-building ballad about the weight of something lingering longer than it should.
The song came to the band during a particularly exhausting period. “We were just so delirious,” their singer recalls. “Delayed flights, five hours on an airport floor in New York, no sleep, straight into a session after landing. There’s kind of an element of like, what is happening?” Somehow, out of that fatigue, the song locked itself into place. “It felt like it was already there. Like it was ready to be written.”
“There’s a subconscious element [to Florence Road’s songwriting]” – Ailbhe Barry
The group’s latest EP, ‘Spring Forward’, encapsulates all the familiar themes of love, loss, confusion and connection, all let go in one ferocious – if fleeting – outpouring. “It’s love in a nutshell,” Aron says of the record. “Different types of love. It’s how you receive love, how you understand it, processing the negative and the good.” “If ‘Fall Back’ is falling back into adulthood,” Kelly suggests, “‘Spring Forward’ is like putting your shoes on and being like, ‘OK, let’s keep going’.”
Compared to the delirium of ‘Heavy’, the recent single ‘Hanging Out To Dry’ is sharper and bursting with adrenaline. It documents the emotional conflict of resisting love after being burned by previous relationships. “We wrote it a few months ago, but the process of recording it and releasing it happened very quickly,” Aron says. “It’s just very cathartic to sing and to play,” she says. “And it’s been amazing to see people’s reactions to the song.”
The vocal melody stretches into a high, almost-breaking-point register, evoking the soaring voice of Dolores O’Riordan, which surprised Aron when she first attempted it. “I didn’t know I could sing that high,” she laughs. “I was like, ‘I’m just gonna try, because that’s where I want the melody to go.’” At first, scaling the notes live felt like a gamble. Now, she says with visible relief, she’s “been hitting it every night”.
This kind of singing echoes the traditional Irish music the band grew up around. All four attended Irish-language school and were immersed in trad music from a young age through playing in bands, something Aron now recognises in her own voice. “I definitely have an old Irish way of vocal flipping,” she says. “It’s very cool how it’s connected to my Irish heritage, and I’m very proud of that.” Florence Road have also recently experimented with tin whistle and traditional instrumentation in newer material, while also “writing bits in Irish” during delirious late-night sessions.
This is a band determined to build. They’ve been thinking about making their show grander and more theatrical, and treated their tour with The Last Dinner Party as a crash course. “It’s watching musicians operate at the highest possible level,” Kelly says, “and giving us a lot of ideas on how to make a live show an experience rather than just a selection of songs.” The group also point to fellow Irish artist CMAT as a live performer they admire, particularly for the way humour and personality become part of her show, while also namechecking Wunderhorse for their effortless cool.
Kelly laughs as she describes one detail they’ve become obsessed with while watching their fans from the stage: “People do this thing. It’s like a synchronised face…” She and her bandmates all immediately scrunch up into what can only be described as a collective stank face. “And they all move their heads at the same time. It’s really strange. But really cool.”
What are Florence Road most determined to hold on to as they keep growing and things keep changing for the brighter and better? Aron doesn’t hesitate. “Inner peace,” she says, then laughs at how serious it sounds. “Just being happy and sure of ourselves and not letting anyone else’s opinions except the four of ours really matter.” Barry quietly adds the line that feels like the real crux of everything, the grounding force beneath all of Florence Road’s momentum: “It’s just the four of us.”
Florence Road’s ‘Spring Forward’ is out now via Warner Records UK. They are currently on tour in the UK.
Listen to Florence Road’s exclusive playlist to accompany The Cover below on Spotify or on Apple Music here.
Words: Georgia Evans
Photography: Marisa Bazan
Label: Warner Records UK