In the charming coastal town of Bray in County Wicklow, Ireland, there’s a stretch of pavement called Florence Road. It’s pretty average, as far as roads go, with quaint houses, a library, a vet, a dollar store, and several coffee shops scattered across it. “It’s not that cute,” jokes drummer Hannah Kelly. “You wouldn’t know walking past that it’s remarkable by any means,” says bassist Ailbhe Barry. “But it’s meaningful to us.”
Florence Road carries so much significance that Kelly, Barry, lead singer Lily Aron, and guitarist Emma Brandon named their indie rock band after it. They all met there at grade school, when they were 12 years old. Aron was already writing songs in her bedroom then (“the most dramatic songs of all time,” she says), but the band didn’t form until four years later. By 2023, their covers of their favorite songs went viral on TikTok.
Now, Florence Road are releasing their debut EP, Fall Back, via Warner, featuring credits from big-name producers like Dan Nigro, Dan Wilson, and John Hill. They’ll bring these five tracks — including the raging opener “Hand Me Downs” and the dazzling, anthemic “Heavy” — to London’s Hyde Park next week, where they’ll open for Olivia Rodrigo to a crowd of 65,000. And they aren’t even a little bit nervous.
“I find it more nerve-racking when there’s less people, and you can see their faces,” Aron admits. “Honestly, being onstage with the three of them, I’m immediately at ease. I’m like, ‘OK, I’m with my friends and this is the biggest thing ever, but it’s also very chill.’” Adds Barry: “I find it fun to try to get Emma to crack onstage by doing silly faces. I’m willing to mortify myself.”
Even if they don’t have stage fright, Hyde Park is a far cry from their school, Coláiste Ráithín, where Aron, Kelly, and Barry would perform at monthly lunchtime concerts put on by their music teacher. Performing in front of other students, they’d cover Hozier and Declan McKenna. “It was the toughest crowd possibly ever: your peers trying to eat lunch, and you’re singing to them,” Aron says. “I think that helped our general comfort on stage. Because off the bat, we were just right in the deep end.”
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Brandon joined later, after she discovered a guitar in her attic during the pandemic and decided to learn the instrument. “I was a late bloomer,” she says. “I didn’t even know what music theory was until Covid, to be perfectly honest.” Aron, ever the supportive friend (the two met first, in primary school), chimes in: “It was drawn to you. One with the guitar, she is.”
Kelly, originally on guitar, switched to drums, and when the quartet performed their first concert at the school’s Christmas show that year, everything fell into place. “We did ‘Happier Than Ever’ by Billie Eilish,” Brandon says. “And never looked back.”
Right before they finished school, they found a poster in the hall advertising a music competition, where the winner would get to record a song and shoot a video for it. They won, and released their debut single, “Another Seventeen,” in October 2022. With lines like “I’m such a hypocrite/And I’m scared of all the things I wanna be,” it’s an angsty teenage banger that shines with thrashing guitar riffs, like an Irish version of Letters to Cleo. (Fitting, considering they posted the song on TikTok to a clip of 10 Things I Hate About You, with the caption “If our debut single ‘Another Seventeen’ was in a coming of age movie.”)
Their manager discovered them after hearing “Another Seventeen” on a Spotify playlist, and they got a gig that fall opening for Irish rockers the Academic. “I was in a different maths class and I went to grab the girls,” Brandon recalls. “I literally walked straight past the teacher and I was like, ‘I need them right now.’ And we just screamed in the bathroom for a long time.”
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The band started performing gigs in Dublin, writing and practicing at Aron’s house. They meet there three times a week, inside a shed her mom used in the pandemic to host a children’s puppet show. Her dad, also a musician, converted it into a rehearsal space. “My dad is over the moon,” Aron says. “He was like, ‘You’re doing exactly what I wanted to do when I was your age.’”
Hunkered down in the shed, each member brings their own influences to the table, creating, as Aron says, “this big pot of everything.” She loves Wolf Alice, Beabadoobee, and the Kinks; Barry grew up listening to the Beatles and Nineties alternative; Brandon has a current obsession with Sam Fender; and Kelly lists U2 and the Cranberries as major inspirations. “I love looking back on the Irish bands that have come before, you know?” she says. “There’s a lot to learn.”
You can see renditions of these favorites on their TikTok, where they have nearly one million followers. They’re often shot on the iPhone’s 0.5 lens, with the flash shining in Aron’s crystal blue eyes, like a tractor beam is about to scoop her up, far away from Ireland’s greenery. The band nail each cover while basking in their goofiness and friendship, like when they performed Olivia Rodrigo’s “Obsessed” while hiding in a closet and “holding Ailbhe hostage.” Rodrigo ended up commenting on that video, while another user wrote, “I’m tired of ya’ll teasing me with these and not having full versions available anywhere. I’ve been holding this grudge since ‘Stick Season.’”
Their cover of Paramore’s “Hard Times,” which has nearly 50 million views, was thrown together in five minutes. “It’s always the ones that I find sound the worst, do the best,” says Brandon. Adds Aron: “The very first time we decided to do the 0.5 type of thing, it was genuinely a piss-take. It was really just like, ‘This is gas. This is so bizarre, no one’s going to get it.’”
Last year, the band took three trips to Los Angeles, their first time on the West Coast. Spending two weeks there at a time, they hung out on Santa Monica Beach, tried all kinds of food via Uber Eats, and survived some painful sunburns. All the while they were recording Fall Back, doing a “speed run” of meeting different producers every day. They were jet-lagged when they cut “Heavy,” produced by Hill, but Aron says the experience was cathartic: “The chorus literally leapt out of my body,” she says. Hill, who’s produced Charli XCX, Cage the Elephant, and others, also co-wrote with them, alongside Marshall Vore, known for his work with Phoebe Bridgers — a “big time” favorite of the band’s. “We were like, ‘Don’t think about it too much, because then you’ll freak out a bit,’” Aron says.
The same goes for working with Nigro, the star producer and co-writer of Rodrigo’s and Chappell Roan’s hits. He assisted the band with the devastating, anxiety-ridden “Caterpillar,” which they bolstered with comforting violin. “Know that I’ll feel better with the tap on/Something ‘bout the water running down my side,” Aron sings. “It just means, ‘Once I just cry and once I let it out, I will feel better,’” she says. “It felt like there was something hatching in my chest — that really uncomfortable tension.”
The band sat with each producer and discussed each song with them, describing the meaning and how they wanted to tackle it. “It was really amazing to go in with Dan Wilson, who was such a sweetheart,” Aron says of the producer, who’s worked with everyone from Adele to Taylor Swift and helped Florence Road make “Hand Me Downs.” “His studio had very peaceful, calming vibes. It was really nice to get that outer perspective of someone who’s not a teenage girl. Do you know what I mean?” After Aron, Barry, and Kelly worked on the track, Brandon was called in to record her guitar part the following day. “He had about 150 pedals and I was just mesmerized,” she says. “Like, ‘Can I just stay here forever?’”
The band tinkered with the track list for the EP, shelving gems like “Miss” and “Break the Girl” — they describe the latter as having an “Alanis Morissette vibe” — for the future. For now, they’re focused on releasing these five songs to capture a “time capsule,” as Barry puts it. Kelly agrees: “Between ‘Another Seventeen’ and ‘Heavy,’ it was three years,” she says. “We just wanted to get the music out in the quickest way possible, for our own sake, because the demos have been burning holes in their pockets since last January.”
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With the release of the EP, they’re also hoping to move away from being known as a viral TikTok band. “We’re definitely trying to slide away from that,” says Aron. “That was something we were nervous about when first releasing ‘Heavy.’ It was like, ‘Are people going to take it seriously and really see us as musicians?’ Because that’s who I feel we are.”
For the band, the title Fall Back is about their experience over the last few years — becoming a band, getting signed by a major label, recording with dream producers. “There’s that feeling of leaving your teenagehood,” Aron says. “Sometimes you’re falling backwards and you don’t know what is going on. The songs go through the joys and the anxiety and confusion that comes with becoming an adult, and how terrifying that is.”
But Aron says the title also represents their childhood friendship that started all those years ago, back on that beloved road. “If you ever see the four of us in person, we are genuinely laughing all the time. We don’t shut up,” she says. “We just have the best times. We are each other’s fallback.”
