INTRODUCING: Florence Black
For the last few years, FLORENCE BLACK have been tearing it up all across the UK with as many shows as they could fit into a given year. Big, brazen swagger and heavy hitting rock riffs are the order of the day when it comes to the Merthyr Tydfil-based trio, who make it their mission to get the room bouncing. When things took a turn last year, fans wondered what would come next? Not ones to disappoint, they’ve got themselves their debut album Weight Of The World recorded and are chomping at the bit to get out.
Having been friends since school, vocalist/guitarist Tristan Thomas, bassist Jordan ‘Foz’ Evans and drummer Perry Davies have a bond that’s arguably tighter than some families. Their music is full of the fun and life that they themselves radiate, and it’s an infectiously good time. Releasing one EP a year between 2016 to 2018, it’s been obvious that FLORENCE BLACK have the work ethic and heart for making music; It’s what they were born to do.
Truly, for three young guys, there’s a sense of old school rock and roll with FLORENCE BLACK. A real touring band at heart, their happy to be together, obsessed with making music and constantly playing with ideas rather than telling life distract them; this is their all. “It’s like every band, we want to play together,” Foz says, “but we’re always together, so we are always bouncing ideas off each other.”
“Some bands are online a lot,” Tris adds, “there’s not many bands like us around now, who are all together all the time, being younger too. So that works to our advantage as well I think.”
The trio have worked tirelessly through the early years of their career, to create ripping big tunes that turn heads at every venue they play. Hard rock riffs, swinging hooks and catchy melodies all make for a great combination, but it’s the relatability that really sells what FLORENCE BLACK are doing. For this upcoming record, their writing is just as intimate as they’ve ever been. “Most of the songs are written about personal experiences and what we’ve been through, what we’re going through,” Tris tells us about the new material. “We’ve got two songs on it from around 2013 when we started the band. I thought they really linked in well with the ideas on the album [but] we’ve experienced a lot of things and that’s reason for writing what I write. As a band, we write about things that are close to us. When we’re all together in a room, we start something and get a vibe going, the main ideas is to get that energy of the live performance, that’s what we’re about as a band.”
FLORENCE BLACK have that very rare thing in their music that, while it translates to some massive stompers when recorded, they are arena-big live. It’s hard to contain that kind of energy on a record and the promise of that on a full album is very exciting. However, with having the time and space to utilise an album to their full potential, there’s some surprises in store. “It’s a bit of everything on this record, it’s not all heaviness,” Tris states. “Because we’ve got ten tracks, we’ve got different types of music we wanted to play. We didn’t just want to just bring out ten tracks of just heavy metal, we wanted something new to please everyone. We’ve always written different types of stuff; I’m always working on different ideas. But with the band live, we mainly go for power, that’s our natural state, we just rock. But with the album, we’ve delved into some softer sounds here and there. To mix it up and make it more of a journey.”
Weight Of The World will be something of a new beast for fans, that even the band wasn’t sure what it would turn into. “We didn’t write the songs one after another, to build a landscape,” Perry explains, “we kept writing songs and picked our best. We wrote songs thinking ‘oh yeah, this will be the second track on the album, this one will be etc’, and those songs are gone now. We were constantly renewing and changing. It was hard for us to pick the ones we wanted to keep!”
A hidden gem of a band, it’s clear that with their debut on the way, FLORENCE BLACK are headed for big things. Excited to be back out playing as soon as possible, their heart really is in being live performers. “That’s where we shine the most really, that’s where you’re going to get the best sense of who we are,” Perry says enthusiastically, “we’ve got some support tours coming up, and we can’t wait to get out any play this new material really!”
Weight Of The World is out now via self-release.
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