Upstairs at Tower Records on O’Connell Street in Dublin, Ailbhe Barry and Lily Aron, two members of the indie-pop band Florence Road, are flipping through records.
It’s noon on a Sunday in late November, and apart from their manager, Mary Power, who’s minding their black guitar case and bags, which are stacked against the glass wall of the still-closed coffee shop next door, nobody else is around yet. The shop has just opened. There isn’t even any music playing.
Swaddled in a black bomber jacket, Aron, who is 21, pulls out a CMAT record. “She’s so inspiring,” she says.
In a shearling jacket and Other Voices scarf, Barry, who is 20, nods to a Nirvana Unplugged record. “Emma’s dad would play this a lot when she was growing up. It’s a big one for her,” she says, referring to Emma Brandon, Florence Road’s guitarist.
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Around the next corner, Hozier’s debut looms from a shelf. “We love Hozier. The first song we ever performed together was Hozier’s From Eden.”
Barry spies something by Lola Young, singer of the huge hit Messy: “We saw her perform at the Brits. She has an incredible voice.”
When they alight on the latest Wolf Alice album, they pause a little longer, as they know the band: Florence Road have just supported the Mercury Prize winners on 16 dates of their European tour.
“The advice they gave us, they were, like, ‘Take care of yourselves, keep your bubble, keep your people,’” Aron says. “A lot of their crew they’d had for a long time. It’s about keeping it together, which I appreciated hearing, because obviously they’ve been at it a lot longer than we have.”
The average music fan might not know who Florence Road are yet, but some of the biggest names in music have already welcomed the Bray four-piece into the A-list fold.
Signed to Warner, with more than a million followers on social media, Florence Road played in front of 65,000 people at Hyde Park in London in June, as support to Olivia Rodrigo. They’re just back from the Other Voices festival in Dingle, where Rhian Teasdale of Wet Leg made a point of catching their set – “Our managers told us after, thank God” – and their TikTok covers of songs by Rodrigo, Billie Eilish and others net them likes in the millions. (“Hell yeahhhhhh,” Rodrigo wrote on TikTok after she saw their take on her song Obsessed.)
Shortly we’ll walk to a coffee shop near the Academy, on Middle Abbey Street, where the sold-out sign for the band’s first headline show, taking place the evening of the day we meet, has gone up. “Wow,” Barry and Aron say, stopping to stare up at the enormous lettering.
Florence Road signed a contract with Warner UK in 2024. “It blew our heads off, the deal,” Aron says of the global agreement, which is for a set number of songs rather than of albums. So far Florence Road have released one EP, Fall Back, with the assistance of Dan Nigro, who has also produced Rodrigo and Chappell Roan, among many others, and they’ve hit the road hard.
Theoretically they’re still based beneath their parents’ roofs, but touring everywhere from Brisbane to Birmingham has become part of their lives. “This is my fourth or fifth day home in the last two months,” Aron says.
For another band it could be too much too soon – they’re all 20 or 21 – but in person Aron and Barry showcase the same impressively steady, down-to-earth character the entire band display to brilliant effect on their goofy, engaging TikToks.
Named after the road in Bray, in Co Wicklow, where Coláiste Ráithín, their secondary school, was once located, Aron, Barry and Hannah Kelly were in third year when they started making music, encouraged by their teacher Ronán Ó Murchú.
“He loved putting on lunchtime concerts, and he’d always be, like, ‘Girls, we’re doing another one Friday. Will you play?’” Aron says.
The band were called Panorama “when it was just the three of us”, which is to say before Brandon, who has known Aron since primary school, joined on guitar. They “tossed that in the bin” once their line-up felt complete. “We’ve had a lot of people being, like, ‘Are you Florence?’ Which one of you is Florence?’” Aron says, laughing.
Her parents had a shed that her father, a bank employee and musician originally from the United States, refashioned into a home-working and music space during Covid.
“When he was working from home he would write songs on his break,” Aron says. Before long Florence Road were the shed’s second set of perma-dwellers.
“We’re so grateful,” Barry says. “Lily’s parents are amazing for letting us walk into their house, have their food, use their bathroom and then we just camp out. We wouldn’t have been able to do it otherwise.”
Aron adds, “It’s so expensive to rent rehearsal space. It’s, like, €60 an hour.”
Fate intervened in other ways. One day Ó Murchú put up a poster at the school advertising a music competition with a prize of getting to record your own song. Florence Road won it.
“That’s how we first did Another Seventeen,” Aron says, pulling up the sleeve of her woolly jumper to show a tiny 17 tattooed on her arm, in the song’s honour. “Me and Hannah both have ’17′ tattoos.”
Released in 2022, Another Seventeen had a disciplined pop-indie strut, showed an American influence and got to its chorus fast with relatable, vulnerable lyrics (“I’m such a hypocrite / And I’m scared of all the things I wanna be / Feel like an idiot / Don’t want to let go of 17″).
When the band played a gig in Wicklow town afterwards, it had room for 100 people; 150 people showed up. The band’s TikTok started blowing up, drawing millions of viewers, partially for their growing songcraft, comedy bits and pitch-perfect covers, and partially for the interesting choices they made visually: they used fisheye-lens setting that made their eyes startlingly big and blue, distorting the image and bringing to mind 1990s MTV videos such as Give it Away, by Red Hot Chili Peppers. (It’s no surprise Barry is studying design for film at Dún Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology – not that she’s there much. “It’s not the priority,” she says. “My lecturers are all really understanding.”)
Raised on the internet, the band knew instinctively that success on TikTok could make their careers. “Sometimes it’s personal taste and sometimes it’s to please the algorithm,” Aron says about their cover-song choices.
Music-industry veterans were noticing. As long ago as 2023 I got a text from a relative, a former record-label executive, to let me know about the band. Music managers were also sitting up – Florence Road are signed with Power and Carl Brogan of Partizan Artists, who saw them play when they were supporting the Partizan band The Academic.
“Even though they were in their Leaving Cert year, there was something immediately compelling about the band: the songwriting, chemistry and their drive,” Power says.
At a recent showcase gig at the Button Factory in Dublin, the band were still palpably testing the boundaries of their sound, but a welcome early-Radiohead-style fuzziness was already in evidence, along with a Green Day-style dedication to handclap-oriented pop-indie bangers, most noticeably with Goodnight, their kiss-off single (“Sorry that I took all our friends / But in fairness you should have put up a better defence”).
The crowd was a mix of art-college students and industry spotters who had come from abroad for Ireland Music Week: think Pitchfork and Rolling Stone (which recently interviewed the band, a milestone in any musician’s career).
At Wigwam, a boho coffee and martini spot on Middle Abbey Street where Aron tries a zinger, a concoction of lemon, ginger and honey designed to ease her aching throat, which is still tender after the rigours of the Wolf Alice tour, she talks about the band’s determination to stay grounded in the midst of industry pressure. They know to check in with each other, she says.
“Things can get swept under the rug and just be, like, ‘Oh, that’s not important. I’ll just get on with it.’ But we want to make sure we’re happy, because it can be stressful at times.”
Their songs Heavy, Storm Warnings and Caterpillar, among others, have a downbeat candour that suggests the surfacing of occasional anxieties (“Abashment lives in me / Caterpillar hatching in my chest / Oh I hate it when I’m not at my best”).
“There’s been a lot of changes in our lives,” Aron says. “For me, when I’m sad or stressed or anxious, the best thing is to write. That’s what I did with Caterpillar. I was literally crying and writing. Then it’s coming back to it when you’re not in that state and making something out of it.”
The band have started to hear their songs on the radio. “I was in the kitchen and Goodnight came on. Me and my boyfriend were, like, ‘What!’” Aron says.
Barry has relatives getting in touch all the time. “I’ll be in the sittingroom and I’ll hear my mum’s phone ring, and then she turns on the radio and she’s, like, ‘Guess what’s on the radio!’”
The Florence Road mothers have a mam’s group. “They’ve been the best,” Aron says. “They have a group chat called Mammies on Tour.” Barry adds, “They’re getting such a buzz out of it. I feel like they’re enjoying it as much as we are.”
Their mothers are likely to be busy over the next year. Florence Road have been announced as support for The Last Dinner Party in North America in 2026; they play the New Year’s Festival in Dublin at the end of the month; and they will headline the 3Olympia in Dublin on May 27th – a gig that sold out in a day.
“It doesn’t feel real,” Aron says. “It’s the kind of moment you imagine for years.” Their fans even have a nickname for themselves: the Flo-Roadies. Next year, between touring and TikToking, will be about writing for the debut album.
A few days after we meet, BBC Radio 1 announces that Florence Road have made its Sound of 2026 longlist, curated by industry experts who have previously named Adele, Chappell Roan, Sam Smith and Keane among their hot tips for the future. The band might still be developing, but they’ve already got to hard-won places on the musical Monopoly board. And, kind of brilliantly, you can tell they know that too.
Before they went on stage at Hyde Park to support Rodrigo, Aron was surprised by her own confidence. “It was such a big gig. I was waiting for the nerves to come in the weeks prior,” she says. “But they never did. It was the first time I didn’t have impostor syndrome. I was just so excited. We couldn’t wait to play. I had a slight sense of, ‘We deserve this.’”
Florence Road play New Year’s Festival Dublin on Wednesday, December 31st, and 3Olympia Theatre, Dublin, on Wednesday, May 27th, 2026
