Image credit: florenceroadtour.com
| Artist | Florence Road |
| Venue | Newcastle University Students’ Union |
| Date | 15 May 2026 |
| Opener | 7563 |
| Closer | Break the Girl |
| Highlight | Heavy |
| Undertone rating | 3/5 |
The buzzy Wicklow rock group have only released a handful of songs, but have already received support from a staggering array of the global music industry’s big names. This set of largely unreleased songs in Newcastle mostly justified the hype, although Flo Ro’s live offering still has plenty of room for improvement.
You can’t trust anything these days. Social media is awash with increasingly realistic, intentionally polarising fakes – politicians being arrested, parliament taken over by Muslims, migrants arriving on small boats – generated using models that were trained in the first place on mass media that many were already calling unreliable and phony. Add to that the ruthlessly competitive social media culture, where we are all guilty of only sharing a miniscule, maximally agreeable portion of our lives, and you have a society where perpetual paranoia is the norm. It is now considered normal amongst many gen Zers to constantly share their locations with one another on Instagram or Snapchat, opting in to nonstop self-surveillance where any dubious excuse for not showing up to the party or being late home from school can be scrutinized.
This stew of distrust is probably what contributed to the outrage last month when it emerged that, so the headlines read, hyper-viral New York band Geese were a ‘psy-op’ – which is to say part of their buzz was generated by fake TikTok accounts posing as fans. The outsized dismay this caused among fans was perhaps more a reflection of how little the average person knows about the dirty, late-capitalism mechanics of social media promotion – getting paid to profess your undying love to a band on TikTok without disclosing it as an ad is now common practice – than it was an indication of any nefarious scheming on Cameron Winter’s part.
Indeed, the rapid rise of any band today provokes immediate suspicion. In recent years, both Olivia Rodrigo and The Last Dinner Party were plagued with industry plant accusations when their debut singles went stratospheric. Some complaints of a rigged system were justified – Rodrigo the Disney child star who’d already lived her whole life in the spotlight, TLDP the epitome of well-heeled upper middle class ‘indie’. But they missed the point: Drivers License and Nothing Matters were both spectacularly good songs at their core. The pop industry is far from a perfect meritocracy but, at least in these cases, the best songs did indeed get the praise and exposure they deserved.
Florence Road know all this very well indeed. They too rocketed to fame from another remarkable debut single, Heavy, which went viral on TikTok through a series of clever fish-eye lens performance videos shot from a garden shed in Wicklow. In the extraordinary year that followed Heavy’s released they’ve toured with both Rodrigo and TLDP, as well as reigning British rock supremos Wolf Alice and fellow viral pop upstart Sombr. Florence Road’s online presence has been so ubiquitous it’s hard to believe that Heavy only came out in March last year, and that tonight’s debut visit to Newcastle comes on their very first headline tour.
So was this success also justified? For Heavy at least, the answer is a clear yes. The track remains the obvious standout in Flo Ro’s set, showcasing everything that makes the band such an enticing prospect. Lily Aron’s vocals are captivatingly ragged, always seemingly on the verge of collapsing under the weight of her own tangible heartbreak. Emma Brandon’s guitar wails a piercing solo and Ailbhe Barry’s bass underpins the gloomy chord progression, but it’s drummer Hannah Kelly who really shines tonight, her inventive, lopsided drum groove swiftly followed by a strikingly delicate piano outro.
The rest of tonight’s show is more of a mixed bag. Aron is already an engaging frontwoman, striking a tragic heroine figure with the help of her ever-present wind machine and elegantly arcing her arms during verses like a painter eking out some finishing touches. Barry, meanwhile, is a reminder of the band’s relative inexperience on big stages – rock concerts are visual as well as auditory performances, and Barry’s apparent mood tonight ranges from mildly interested to bored stiff. She only comes alive for Surprise Surprise, one of several unreleased songs tonight, where she coordinates a fun piece of crowd participation in sync with Aron’s see-saw melody.
Necessarily for a band yet to release their first album, the unreleased songs come thick and fast, and opening with the forgettable 7563 makes for a slow start for tonight’s set – some fans near me are already heading for top ups at the bar by song three. Fortunately, most of the other new tracks are more promising. Grungy Something is the catchiest, whilst How Does It Make You Feel features a guitar riff that may or may not be a reference to Avril Lavigne’s Sk8er Boi.
Unfortunately the dingy NUSU venue is a tough room to excel in for any band, and Brandon’s guitar distortion is almost completely neutered by the muddy mix. It’s most glaring on the Pixies-esque White Smile, where Brandon’s intended lightning strikes of tremolo end up just sounding like empty gaps. Miss, a rip-roaring slow burn single, also consequently falls flat, Aron’s raging vocals about “ghosts in my kitchen” sounding out of place in front of such a meek backing.
The two songs that the band have been relentlessly plugging on social media lately, Storm Warnings and Hanging Out to Dry, predictably get the most phone cameras aloft, but Flo Ro’s real songwriting gem is Caterpillar, tonight saved for the encore. Aron wrote the song in her bedroom when she was 16, a sweeping ballad about mental health of Olivia Rodrigo’s high calibre (in fact, the band somehow got frequent Rodrigo collaborator and seasoned hitmaker Dan Nigro to produce the single). Aron’s lilting refrain of “I don’t wanna feel like I did yesterday” duly summons a sea of waving phone torches in the crowd, although in NUSU it’s more like a puddle.
Closer Break the Girl is also a winner, a fun Cranberries-indebted singalong that ends with aplomb, Aron belting out the title lyrics in the most anthemic hook of the night. The band rush off stage without even taking their customary photo with the crowd for their Instagram. At the merch stand I linger until the crowds dissipate and chat to (genuinely superb) support act MOIO, but Aron and co are nowhere to be seen. It seems Flo Ro have bigger fish to fry – a big slot at Radio 1’s Big Weekend in Sunderland next week is incoming, as are monumental shows at Reading & Leeds Festival, Primavera Sound, and London’s Finsbury Park with Wolf Alice. It’s easy to see why the powers that be in the music industry have thrown in their lot so unreservedly – the band’s songwriting is orthodox but consistently polished, and Aron is a special vocalist – but so far it seems their best songs are yet to be written. No doubt they’ll be headlining Glastonbury in a few short years, so long as the TikTok effect really is as powerful as it seems.
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