Maisie Peters is a singer-songwriter from Sussex who’s 26, next week, and is a protégé of Ed Sheeran (she’s on his Gingerbread Man label). If you’re younger than her, you’ve likely never heard of her, but her last album, The Good Witch, was a chart-topper, and the one before that, her 2021 debut, only stalled at No. 2. She has a devoted fanbase.
Her third album is lyrically impressive, if lacking musical heft. Her default musical mode is over-airy acoustic songs, carefully painted with warm electronic production, occasionally rising to a pulse that’s faintly danceable. What she does has much in common with Taylor Swift, a common trait in contemporary female pop stars, in this case in the US singer’s indie-folk Folklore/Evermore phase.
Peters’ witty songwriting is a cut above the usual. While Florescence would fail the Bechdel-Wallace Test, which is to say every song is written in relation to a man she’s with or fancies, or a boy she was once with or who has done her wrong. Once the listener accepts this, there’s much to enjoy.
“I’ve never been in the perfume ad/My body’s not a temple, more a bachelorette pad,” runs the opening line of the album, on “Mary Jane”. From here, the lyrical smarts are pretty much ceaseless. Whether, she’s obsessing over one-that-got-away on “Vampire Time” (“I tried the sweet boys and the deep boys and they were all full of shit”), wryly mocking pretentious old lovers whose bohemianism was propped up by wealth on “Houses”, or skewering yet another loser on piano ballad “You Then Me Now” (“My heart used to break/Now it’s all muscle”), her lyrics nail it.
It’s a shame the tunes don’t always live up to the wordage. But enough are persuasive, albeit in a puff pastry teen-pop way. For evidence, check out the Latin-tinted “My Regards, the country-pop throb of “Old Fashioned”, or the pure soppiness of “Audrey Hepburn”. “Florescence” means floral blooming. Florescence says Maisie Peters is leaving the crap behind, blossoming. She does so with snarky diaristic flare. It would be great to hear her ensconced within meatier production and music.
Below: watch the video for "My Regards" by Maisie Peters
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