Florence Road

What makes Florence Road so instantly magnetising isn’t just their striking frontwoman Lily Aron with her impassioned, grainy vocals, but the dynamic she shares with her best friends, guitarist Emma Brandon, bassist Ailbhe Barry and drummer Hannah Kelly. Shortly after the four of them became alternative music’s most thrilling new band, they started posting on social media, a mixture of silly videos that displayed their friendship and cover songs filmed in an uncanny confrontational style on an iPhone 0.5 magnification setting.

Their friendship was what inspired their band name: when they were spitballing ideas and Hannah said, “What about Florence Road?” they instantly knew it made sense. “It’s in Bray where we all met; our old school used to be on that road, so it felt sentimental in a way and made sense for the whole story of how we came to be a band in the first place,” remembers Hannah.

School was not just where the members decided to form a band, but where they were nurtured as musicians and artists. They went to a supportive Irish language school in Bray, Co.Wicklow, where their music teacher encouraged them to play gigs to the school at lunchtime for years. “Looking back, it really helped us develop, because one of the hardest audiences to play to is your peers trying to eat lunch,” Lily says. “That was a tough crowd right off the bat, so I think it was definitely a good learning experience.”

Just down the road from Dublin, Florence Road cut its teeth playing gigs as a very young—only in their mid-teens when they started to play there—part of the famously vibrant and always eclectic scene. “We’re very proud to be Irish and Irish culture is hugely important to us. The creative scene all around us is incredibly strong right now and it’s great that we’re able to be a part of that,”

The music itself feels like an eloquent synthesisation of their individual influences—a shared language formed through years of deep listening and mutual discovery. Comparisons to The Cranberries often surface—not just because of their Irish roots, but also due to the immediacy of Lily’s vocal presence, which carries that same haunting clarity and emotional depth. It’s an impressively developed sound, one that feels both timeless and new, built on decades of rock tradition and culture, but unafraid to push boundaries.

No conversations were had about the kind of music Florence Road would make; neither did they discuss their songs before they wrote them. Instead, they jam ideas out together in a room, waiting to see what occurs, it has always felt very natural. “All of our brains work really quickly,” explains Lily. “We just follow a feeling or what feels right and what makes it so exciting is that there’s no parameters on our music. We go from playing the piano, maybe writing some harmonies or else it could be the four of us just full on in the shed, rocking out,” That sense that truly anything can happen translates to the listener too; their songs shapeshift tantalisingly from rock subgenre to subgenre, switching up the tempo or the character of the transmission. It never feels forced or calculated, only exciting.

“It’s kind of mad that us four random girls from Wicklow are here with opportunities like this. We have had such incredible support from everyone and feel very grateful for everything that is happening.”

It's an impossibly lucky break to them but it isn’t strange to their cult-like following and it won’t be to anyone about to be acquainted with Florence Road. It’s as straightforwardly obvious and natural as four inseparable school friends starting a band.