Driving through the fields and forests of Bray – known as the 'Garden of Ireland', as we're told by anyone who asks where we're off to on this trip – the band manager at the wheel tells us how he came across his latest act. When looking to fill a support slot for fellow Irish group The Academic, he stumbled upon a flyer for a group of teenage girls who'd been playing school concerts and booked them on a whim after finding out they lived close by. He describes how he was immediately taken aback by their performance.

This is the usual reaction to Florence Road. The four-piece, consisting of Lily Aron on vocals, Emma Brandon on guitar, Ailbhe Barry on bass, and Hannah Kelly on drums, have been pretty effortlessly wowing anyone who crosses their path from day one, whether that be the thousands of followers they'd amassed online without having a real single out, or the actual pop A-listers they can call fans.

Obviously, we were wowed, too - hence why we've hopped across the Irish sea to do a cover with a band who, at our time of departure, had one proper single out and one other self-released track from a couple of years ago. We head to the girls' hometown of Bray via Dublin (where, for the 24 hours we're there, it lashes it down) and plonk ourselves down in Lily's dad's shed for a chat after a day of trailing around our shoot location, Knocksink Wood.

"It feels like the new normal, to be in a constant state of excitement," says Lily. It's 4pm, and we've spent hours of the day bustling around her family house, and if the way her parents and brother so graciously accept the chaos around them – the kitchen island as a hair and makeup station, the floor cluttered with strangers' suitcases, and we're still never left without a cup of tea – is anything to go by, this is their normal. Although it doesn't seem quite new, the handwritten sign taped up pointing towards the loo doesn't look like it was put up in our honour, and the shed itself is already serving its third purpose.

At first, it was just a dumping ground, then a TV set for a kid's puppet show called 'Martin's Shed', the remnants of which still hang on the walls alongside her dad's numerous guitars, before becoming the place Lily and her friends would rehearse together as Florence Road. Everything the band have built so far has happened in this shed, but their story really starts ten minutes down the road, at their school on… guess the street name?

Lily and Emma met at the age of five, and got to know Ailbhe and Hannah by twelve. "We knew each other, but we didn't properly become friends till when we were like, 16," says Lily. She, Ailbhe and Hannah took music together, with the teacher of that class encouraging the trio to take part in the lunchtime concerts he ran. "We played some interesting covers; I wouldn't say they were very good," Lily recalls.

"I liked it, as an audience member," says Emma, who joined after picking up the guitar in lockdown. She approached them after the school's big Christmas concert, her induction into the band meaning Hannah, the initial guitarist, was shimmied to the back to learn drums.

By the time they'd gotten together in their late teens, the girls had each developed their own personal tastes with little crossover. Emma and Ailbhe go for different strains of classic rock (the latter notes The Beatles and Fleetwood Mac, the former a little heavier with AC/DC and Metallica), Hannah wants to implant Sam Fender's 'People Watching' into her brain, while Lily shouts out Beabadoobee, her dad's love of The Smiths and The Cure, and her mum's love of U2.

The soup that bubbles up from that mixing pot is something in between the frantic, delicate, and heavy sounds reminiscent of early Wolf Alice, bouncy 90s-leaning indie rock and confessional singer-songwriter lyricism. Also slapping you right in the face is Lily's Irish lilt, which, when combined with those 90s influences, undeniably recalls The Cranberries and Sinead O'Connor.

But they haven't always sounded like this. In 2022, Florence Road released one song, 'Another Seventeen', after winning the chance to record a track and music video in a competition. The track is bright, obvious festival indie, with scream-along lyrics and a level of youthful melancholia that showed that even in their scrappiest form, the band's promise was still clear.

"We like to shit on it a bit," says Hannah, "but it literally got us to support The Academic, it is so special." "It was the domino that started the whole thing," says Lily.

One of those gigs was at a place called The Fish Bowl, the upstairs of a pub that's free to rent out and which, even at that early stage, Florence Road managed to oversell. "It can hold like 100 people," says Ailbhe, "but we sold 150 tickets."

It was in places like that where Florence Road found their spark. Word quickly spread beyond their friendship circle (which is later revealed as just the four of them, Emma's girlfriend and another friend), and they began the rite-of-passage slogging across the city gig circuit.

"All of our friends would come, and we'd be performing, and they'd be like, max a metre away," Lily explains. "We'd be singing at them, and they'd sing back, and that was the first place that we played 'Another Seventeen', I think. I remember it was the first time we had people know the words to a song that we were doing. When everyone screamed 'Let go of 17', I was feeling like, this is crazy, this is the buzz I've been looking for. So we kept doing gigs in Dublin, and venturing out, and taking all the kit on the DART or on the bus. But we loved it."

She's, of course, referring to what came next, and quickly. After finishing school, the girls began their first lot of writing sessions in January 2024, with Lily and Hannah popping over to London for a week to workshop some songs.

"It felt like we were using 100% of our brains," adds Hannah.

Coming this spring is Florence Road's debut mixtape, 'Fall Back'. Spearheaded by their knockout debut single 'Heavy', the mixtape sees the girls get in the room with big-name producers faster than they could've ever imagined.

Where 'Heavy' was produced by John Hill (whose best work includes contributions to Charli xcx, Florence + the Machine, and MUNA tracks), their follow-up, the delicate and pensive 'Caterpillar', had Dan Nigro's magic wand waved over it (a name that's been wafting around since the 2020s kicked in, thanks to his collaborations with Olivia Rodrigo and Chappell Roan). Also making an appearance in the credits of 'Fall Back' is Dan Wilson, whose roster of hits includes work with a couple of small artists; maybe you've heard of Taylor Swift and Adele?

There's a wide-eyed optimism about Florence Road that seems to stop this whole rollercoaster from derailing. It's only the very beginning, and with everything exciting so far only happening behind the scenes, being so close-knit helps the four stay grounded.

"When we started doing those first sessions, we very quickly had a lot of meetings, and we were meeting with kind of every single record label in the UK. It was the coolest thing ever, but also kind of scary. Everyone does tell you what you want to hear," Lily explains.

"It had never crossed my mind until it was like, okay, now you're meeting with the three big names. I was like, surely not?" adds Ailbhe.

It helps that the girls are so giddy, because Dork has been putting them through their paces today. Several hours scaling the woods in the rain and icy winds would've been enough to put any band off ever agreeing to an on-location photo shoot again, but they take it like real champs.

As grounded (and bewildered) as Florence Road are, when the boring side of the internet catches wind of a young female band who are doing well, accusations of being 'industry plants' feel poised to end up knocking on their door.

Following the release of 'Another Seventeen', the girls started regularly posting videos on TikTok, garnering a sizeable following for their covers and original songs, usually performed in the shed and shot on the iPhone 0.5 setting, in the dark with the flash on. The most viral of those covers was an off-the-cuff rendition of Paramore's 'Hard Times', which currently sits at a comfortable seven million likes.

"My parents think they look horrible because they don't understand the concept of 0.5. They're like, why do you look like that?" says Hannah. "And I think also making silly videos and not taking it too seriously kind of separates TikTok and our band, so we're not like a TikTok band," adds Emma.

"That's something we were obviously nervous about when we released 'Heavy', because we were like, are we going to be taken seriously?" Lily says. "A lot of our content is stupid and not that serious, and I wanted people to take us seriously as a band. I think the response was really positive, and it was just nice to be seen as not just a cover band. I know a lot of people follow us because we do covers, but I think the goal ultimately is to be able to not do them; we'll be able to just have our own music be the driving force."

That'll be happening sooner than they think. With the 'Fall Back' mixtape just around the corner, it's a tight six tracks that signal the arrival of a band worth jumping on the bandwagon for. Florence Road have everything you want in a modern band: a true magpie attitude that sees them pull inspiration from all-time greats and remodel it into something fresh, a penchant for fun without ever losing sight of the serious stuff, and so much heart you can't help but believe in them. On 'Fall Back', no two tracks sound the same, but they all sound like Flo Ro, a remarkable feat on a debut release.

'Figure It Out' is the next single and reveals yet another side of the girls' sonic palette. Yelping vocals, bratty delivery, it's the most garage rock we've heard them sound so far. There's only so much we can say about the mixtape, but it'll be out in time for their biggest gig yet, supporting Olivia Rodrigo as she winds down her 'Guts' World Tour in London's Hyde Park and Dublin's Marlay Park.