There are rare occasions when a band’s breakthrough feels close enough to touch.
The kind of moment that turns a growing following into a mass-market phenomenon seemingly overnight. For Feist, it was 1234 in an iPod commercial. For Metric, it was Black Sheep in Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. Florence Road eye the horizon, looking for theirs.
It is on this perch we find the four childhood friends from County Wicklow, Ireland: bassist Ailbhe Barry, guitarist Emma Brandon, drummer Hannah Kelly and singer Lily Aron.
In the latter, the band have a frontwoman whose star wattage is almost blinding. Half-hidden behind a tumble of hair she keeps brushing from her eyes, Aron’s voice moves from intimate hush to soaring roar within a breath, building a static charge with every moment onstage. It would be cruel to heap phrases such as ‘icon in the making’ upon someone barely into her twenties, but every eye in the room stays fixed on her.
Around her, Florence Road are caught in a swell that feels close to breaking. Opening slots for Olivia Rodrigo and Wolf Alice. Major coverage in Rolling Stone and the NME. A deal with Warner Music. Early EPs already reselling for silly prices before a debut album has materialized.
This show marks the final date of their inaugural North American headline tour, in Toronto’s 200-capacity Drake Underground – long sold out and already far too small a room for a band filling venues several times its size Stateside.
And for a little over an hour, they thrill. Standout single Miss, a winsome lament for a departed lover, begins as a gentle two-chord acoustic number before mutating into something haunted and heavy, capped by a Muse-esque outro. Rabbits Can Swim, meanwhile, is a warm love song with shades of Sufjan Stevens and Bon Iver. “Knock on my door, tell me you’re sure, tell me you need me,” they swoon, with the sort of disarming open-heartedness that only the young can summon.
Fan favourite Caterpillar channels the warmth of early Coldplay (that’s a good thing), while other songs carry traces of Wolf Alice and Olivia Rodrigo, both of whom were smart enough to snag the band for support slots last year. Hints of Paramore, Phoebe Bridgers and indie namesake Florence + The Machine also drift in and out of the mix.
The comparisons could continue, but at a certain point it is worth stating the obvious: their songs are just so good.
Running the gamut of emotion – aggression, insecurity, resentment, longing, contentment – and unafraid of letting one bleed messily into another, this is a band that has not yet settled into a fixed form and is all the better for it. Songs like Heavy and Hanging Out to Dry wrong-foot and surprise; moods pivot; arrangements bloom or rupture. The palette is broader than two EPs from a young guitar band have any right to suggest.
Those EPs – last year’s Fall Back and this year’s Spring Forward – are played in full tonight, alongside a quartet of new songs. At this stage of Florence Road’s career, their entire released output just about fills a short headline set. And there is something thrilling about catching a band at that point: before the catalogue becomes large enough for favourites to disappear, before the rooms grow too big, before the mythology calcifies into canon.
The only thing remaining is the breakthrough song. Everything else is in place.
What Florence Road do not yet have is that earth-shattering radio hit, the viral TikTok moment, the movie placement or algorithmic accident that suddenly propels a promising act into mass culture – a Good Luck, Babe!, a Blame Brett, a Yellow.
Next year will bring a debut album, and with it a shove from the perch. Time to fly, girls.
Florence Road release new single Wish Upon You on October 9 via Warner Music.
