Florence Black

School friends from Merthyr

Florence Black are Tristan Thomas on vocals and guitar, Jordan 'Foz' Evans on bass and Perry Davies on drums. The three have known each other since school in Merthyr Tydfil, and the band dates from October 2012. For the first few years the work was covers on the south Wales pub circuit, which is a slower apprenticeship than most bands of their standing have served, and it shows in the way they play: no fourth member, no backing tracks, nothing that cannot be reproduced by three people on a small stage.

The original material they eventually settled on draws on 1970s heavy metal, 1980s arena rock and 1990s grunge in roughly equal measure. Thomas writes it, and he writes it close to home. "Most of the songs are written about personal experiences and what we've been through, what we're going through," he has said, which is a plain description of a catalogue that mostly deals in domestic trouble rather than fantasy.

Davies has been just as plain about where the band actually lives. Asked where people get the best sense of Florence Black, he pointed at the stage: "That's where we shine the most really, that's where you're going to get the best sense of who we are." A decade of touring behaviour has followed that logic — as many UK shows a year as they can physically play.

Three EPs, then a debut

Between 2016 and 2018 they put out one EP a year — the self-titled Florence Black EP in 2016, four tracks, and EP II in 2017, also four. The Final EP arrived in 2019 and carried a cover of Budgie's 'Breadfan', a nod to the other Welsh power trio that has never left the set since. The same year the standalone single 'Bird on a Chain' went to number one on the Welsh iTunes rock chart, which was the first evidence that the audience was bigger than the rooms they were playing.

The debut album, Weight of the World, was self-released on 17 September 2021, produced by Romesh Dodangoda. It was a genuine chart event for an unsigned band: number 24 on the Official Scottish Albums Chart, 25 on the Official Albums Sales Chart and 33 on the Official Album Downloads Chart in the week dated 30 September 2021. The vinyl pressing did better still the following year, reaching number 13 on the Official Vinyl Albums Chart and number three on the Official Record Store Chart in the week of 26 May 2022 — a physical-sales profile that says a lot about who buys this band's records and how.

The lead single 'Can You Feel It' had already clipped the bottom of the national charts in June 2021, at 100 on the Official Singles Sales Chart and 96 on downloads.

Bed of Nails and a national chart entry

The second album, Bed of Nails, was announced for 1 December 2023 and then pushed back. Dodangoda produced again, and the record was self-released. It entered the Official Albums Chart at number 92 in the week dated 15 February 2024 — the band's first appearance on the main album chart — and did considerably better on the component charts: number nine in Scotland, number eight on sales, number 11 on downloads and 15 on vinyl.

'Start Again', released ahead of it, had reached 93 on the singles sales chart and 89 on downloads in June 2023. It is now one of the fixtures of the live set, usually third or fourth in, and one of the few songs in the catalogue the whole room sings back without prompting.

Between the two albums the pattern of the band's career became clear: no major label, modest headline rooms, and a chart position each time that embarrasses the size of the venues.

Pouring Rain, April 2026

The third album, Pouring Rain, came out on 10 April 2026 on the band's own Florence Black Records. It is the most inward-looking thing they have made, built around emotional fallout and recovery, and it stretches further into slow, wide-open material than either predecessor.

It showed up at number 48 on the Official Albums Chart Update of 19 April 2026, then settled at 21 on the Scottish chart and 17 on the Official Album Downloads Chart in the week dated 23 April; the vinyl charted at 26 on 11 June. Press was warm rather than unanimous. The Danish site Heavy Metal gave it 6/10, calling the guitar work razor-sharp and the band's stage presence dominant while objecting to long introductions and flat choruses in the album's middle stretch, and judging the whole honourable but forgettable next to the first two records. Live reviewers took the opposite view, finding the new songs the strongest part of the set.

The album was built to be toured immediately. The Pouring Rain Tour Part I was announced with tickets on sale from 6 February 2026: nine dates between 8 and 17 April, opening at Whelan's in Dublin, taking in Belfast's Limelight 2, Buckley, Edinburgh, Sunderland, Cambridge, Bradford and Southend, and finishing at Clwb Crown in Merthyr Tydfil. Delour, a five-piece also from south Wales, opened most nights; Trucker Diablo took the Belfast show.

Standing now: Mammoth, Cardiff, Steelhouse

The band are in the middle of their biggest run of shows to date. On 28 January 2026 it was announced that they would be special guests to Mammoth, Wolfgang Van Halen's band, on a European tour through November and December 2026 — Hamburg, Copenhagen, Oslo, Gothenburg, Berlin, Warsaw, Prague, Paris, Antwerp, Cologne, Luxembourg, Stuttgart, Milan, Solothurn, Budapest, Vienna, Nuremberg and Amsterdam, with a London headline date for Mammoth at the O2 Shepherd's Bush Empire on Tuesday 24 November 2026. The run brackets Mammoth's own arena support slots with Deep Purple in Newcastle, Glasgow, Birmingham and Manchester between 18 and 22 November. "We're extremely excited to announce we're heading back to Europe this year as special guests to the legend Wolfgang Van Halen and his band Mammoth," the band said at the time.

Their own headline dates resume immediately after. The Pouring Rain Tour Part II opens at the Great Hall, Cardiff University Students' Union on Saturday 19 December 2026 and continues in February 2027: Manchester O2 Ritz on the 19th, KK's Steel Mill in Wolverhampton on the 20th, The Garage in Glasgow on the 21st, the Adrian Flux Waterfront in Norwich on the 23rd, Rock City in Nottingham on the 24th, the Fire Station in Bournemouth on the 26th and Exeter Phoenix on the 27th. The step up in room size from April is obvious — Rock City and the Ritz are a different order of venue from Chinnerys and Nightrain.

The biggest booking landed at the end of October 2026, when Steelhouse Festival announced its first wave for 2027 and put Florence Black at the top of the opening night. The festival runs 23–25 July 2027 on the mountain above Ebbw Vale, with Massive Wagons, John 5 & The Creatures, Billy Sheehan's The Fell, FM and Crobot also confirmed. "It is an honour to headline Steelhouse," the band said. "From our first appearance in 2017 to every time we've played since, this festival has always meant so much to us." Organisers confirmed it will be their only festival appearance of the summer.

The room problem

The recurring note in reviews of the April 2026 tour was a mismatch between what the band do and where they do it. Writing up the Sunderland show at The Independent on 13 April, Fracture said the band's sound "only gets bigger and louder and unapologetic" and added that the reviewer was "shocked they are not in bigger rooms and on bigger stages, because simply put, that's where these boys belong". MetalTalk's review of the Merthyr homecoming on 17 April, in a sold-out 400-capacity Clwb Crown, described a band mixing melodic and metallic material without visible effort in front of a crowd spanning several generations.

The Mammoth tour and the February 2027 headline dates are the test of that argument. For most of the band's existence the recorded evidence — three albums, each charting higher than seems plausible for a self-released trio — has run ahead of the venues. The next nine months are the first stretch where the rooms catch up.