The calm ambition of Maisie Peters

Up until recently, Peters felt like a hidden gem - an “if you know, you know” artist for the girlies. I’m yet to meet a straight man who’s heard of her. She’s the kind of celebrity my dad would say, “who?”. But seeing her The Good Witch tour at Wembley in November 2023, surrounded by a sea of angsty, screaming women in their twenties and thirties (plus a few younger fans, their chaperoning dads, and some token boyfriends who looked like they’d been marched there with a gun to their head), it quickly became clear: I was exactly her target demographic.

Fast forward to this February and "My Regards" - the first single from her new album Florescence - is everywhere. Almost overnight, Peters has gone from the internet’s favourite secret to someone my mum taps the steering wheel to.

When I meet Peters, she’s fresh off a morning mini-show at Spotify. I tell her there’s no way I could do her job, belting out songs before it’s even lunchtime. She laughs and says her boyfriend says the same. From there, she starts singing his praises: just last night he set up her new MacBook, even remembering her email password for her. Before I have a chance to hit ‘record’, it quickly turns into a kind of manifesto - the standards she tells her friends to aim for when dating. A man with a job and a salary. A man who can sort out technology issues. A man who texts back.

We both laugh and in sync, say: “the bar is so low.”

It’s exactly the kind of conversation I have in WhatsApp group chats with my own friends. I like her immediately.

It feels slightly passé to admit you discovered an artist post-breakthrough, but I came to Peters after her second album – mostly after seeing girls cooler than I posting her songs to their Instagram stories. But Peters started her career busking in West Sussex as a teenager, and building an audience through posting YouTube covers, before writing songs for TV - including Netflix’s The Kissing Booth. In 2020, she signed to Ed Sheeran’s Gingerbread Man Records and her 2021 debut You Signed Up For This was only blocked from the top of the UK charts by Ye’s surprise release Donda.

Then came 2023’s The Good Witch; a rage-filled, hyper-specific breakup album that debuted at Number 1, even the individual singles didn’t climb quite as high. “Body Better” and “Lost the Breakup” charted briefly - but not enough to make hearing one playing in ASDA feel entirely normal. At this stage, Peters doesn’t measure success by chart positions. For her, it’s the rooms, the venues, and the people choosing to show up. “Success to me is individual people around the world giving their time - and their dollars or their pounds - to come and be with the music for a night,” she tells me. “That’s the biggest sign it’s actually impacting people.”

She recalls a show at Radio City in New York: “I remember seeing a group of girls filming themselves on 0.5 on their phone, singing “Lost the Breakup” to each other. I was like wow; you have such a relationship to the music outside of me that you want to capture that moment without me. You’re not watching me, you’re watching each other.”

Still, the jump from cult favourite to mainstream isn’t always smooth. In 2024, Peters was chosen to open for Taylor Swift on the London leg of Eras. A lifelong Swiftie, she says she found out while in a Brighton New Look. When she took the call, she screamed. “That store should have a blue plaque: ‘Maisie Peters found out she was playing the Eras Tour here’,” she jokes. “It was genuinely a dream. My whole life, that’s been on my bucket list.”

After finishing her opening set for the Eras Tour, still high on adrenaline, she joined the crowd - her boyfriend in a bright pink homemade “MAISIE PETERS IS MY GIRLFRIEND” T-shirt - just as Swift began “Fearless”. Peters describes it as “like a film.”

On a whim, she posted a snippet her videographer had taken of her performing "Lost the Breakup" - a clip she describes as “unbelievable, the coolest video ever.” She uploaded it to TikTok and Instagram, thinking little of it. Minutes later, as Swift sang Long Live, Peters checked her phone: a million views and hundreds of comments. And they didn’t stop.

The video had gone viral - but she was facing a live barrage of abuse. In the clip, her voice cracks as she sing-shouts the spoken-word, fan-favourite bridge - a shouty ode to calling men out on their bullshit. She purposefully slurs, “I’m kinda busy, like, I’m with Taylor tonight!”, changed nightly, in the same way Sabrina Carpenter became known for switching up the “Nonsense” outros on her Short n’ Sweet tour. It’s a physically demanding moment in the song, delivered in a dry, vocal-fry style. It’s a purposefully messy ‘inside joke’ - except this time, the new audience didn’t get it. The stadium full of upbeat pop fans might have loved it, but the online masses did not.

Comments rolled in: “and the crowd goes… to the merch stand”, “sounds like me on karaoke”. Start typing her name into TikTok, and the search bar auto-fills to “Maisie Peters can’t sing.” I feel bad bringing it up. The moment I mention Eras, there’s a flicker - just for a second - like she’s bracing herself. Peters is well aware of the backlash.

“It sort of blew up for not all the right reasons and got a lot of hate in a really insane way. It's just a video of a girl singing. And that video gets comments every day.” Peters plays with the tab on her can of Coke Zero, a sadness in her usually bubbly voice. "I've got relatively thick skin. You know, it's people coming to me from their bedrooms, while I was on the Eras Tour stage, so who cares? And whilst that is objectively true, in the moment, I remember I was doing the Noah Kahan tour at the same time. I had a crazy week where I was doing Noah’s shows, and I did the Eras tour on Monday, Birmingham on Tuesday to do a Noah Kahan show. Wednesday and Thursday I played the O2. And then on Friday, I moved house. Literally cut to me on Friday putting bin bags of my stuff in my dad's C-Max”. She’s laughing again now.

Age - and her relationship to it - runs through the new record. She describes herself as “the oldest 25-year-old in the world,” having been working since she was 13. At one point, she lights up: “It’s like that Taylor lyric” – I must look blank, because she quickly fills in the gap – “How can a person know everything at 18 and nothing at 22?” She laughs. “I’m quoting this like it’s a literary thesis, but it’s so true.”

In an industry that feeds on “youth and newness,” she wanted Florescence to do the opposite; “to almost celebrate seeing yourself as an old lady at 20.” It’s partly tongue-in-cheek, but the feeling behind it isn’t. “There’s rampant ageism and misogyny that runs through most industries,” she says, noting how, especially for women in entertainment, getting older can feel like losing relevance. “You see 17-year-olds burst onto the scene and think, I’ve been doing this a long time - does that make me less interesting or less cool?”

Her response is to push back on that idea entirely – but I jump in and remind her: you’re still 25. “Of course, I’m still so young,” she says, aware of the contradiction. “That’s the craziness of it… having that fear of not being the new young thing, when you objectively still are.”

Her fanbase has grown up alongside her – some of those relationships now span a decade: “I’ve known some of my fans for over 10 years… I recognise loads of them.” She tells me about a listening party in Paris, where one girl stood out immediately. “I was like, 'You were at The Good Witch show! We held hands!” she laughs. “I really remembered her - there’s a really cute picture of us.”

Now, as she enters a new period with Florescence, it’s not just the music that’s evolving; there’s a clear shift in how she’s marketing it, too. “My Regards” - a “sexy country and western” track - arrives with a TikTok-primed line dance and a music video starring internet heartthrob Benito Skinner, directed by the queen of viral moments herself, Chicken Shop Date host Amelia Dimoldenberg - who Peters quips “is British culture.” It’s a match made in Gen-Z heaven.

Despite these choices, Peters certainly doesn't see virality as the key to a number one hit. I ask whether that crossover between music and internet culture is intentional. “Things are successful all the time, and always for different reasons," she replies. "The things that really reach the greatest heights are the ones that feel the most authentic - and the most unique. Like nobody else could have made them.”

She points to artists like Chappell Roan and Noah Kahan: “It’s impossible that anyone else could make that type of music. Uniqueness is, I think, one of the most important things for success.”

In the days before our interview, Peters has just come off the European leg of her pre-album tour, Before the Bloom. With only a handful of tracks released, the shows have become something of a testing ground – fans turning up not just to hear what they know, but to discover what’s coming next. She says she wanted to bridge the gap between old and new music and “put on a tour that represented the journey I've been on in music”. Her favourite new song to perform from the record is the unreleased “Vampire Time” – a song about how she met her boyfriend. “I love that song,” she tells me. “It's still so new and fresh to us all, and it's not out yet, which sort of feels exciting, but so country as well. Tina [Hizon, her pianist] plays the violin on it.”

She reaches deep on choosing her live favourite from The Good Witch, landing on “Coming of Age” – a song full of unhinged feminine rage, containing the fan-favourite line “Baby, I am the Iliad, of course you couldn't read me”. She recalls how she used to open that record’s tour with it and then was confused why she struggled for the rest of the show. The memory comes with a laugh. “I’d be literally bouncing around the stage… it’s like 100-something BPM, and I’d just go for it.” She pauses, smiling at the hindsight. “And now I’m like, oh my God, no wonder I was out of breath the whole time.”

But with time - and age - comes a certain clarity. Florescence marks both a shift in sound and in performance. “It’s been interesting playing it live, it’s felt the most natural that playing music has ever felt to me,” she says. “I’ve had enough experience now to know what comes easily. This album… it just fits. It’s in my range, in the way I sing, in the way I play. It feels much more natural.”

That ease was already there at the first Before the Bloom underplay at the Earth venue in Hackney, before any new music had been released. The performance was noticeably more stripped back with Peters stood beside a small side table, topped with a simple vase of flowers; a quiet, pared-down setting that felt worlds away from the theatrical scale of her The Good Witch tour three years ago.

“The show was about celebrating that journey,” she explains, “which is why it happened between the two albums. I’m sort of marking what it’s taken to get me to Florescence.” The record itself, she says, is “much more grounded - in life and in who you are. Being proud of where you’re from and what it’s taken to get you here.”

That sense of grounding runs through everything, including its visual world. “Florescence feels very botanic,” she says. “There’s a lot of nature, the English countryside - it feels very British to me.” Written between London and her hometown in Sussex, the album draws from a period she describes simply as “more settled.”

The title itself became a kind of anchor for her: “I love the metaphor, that Florescence is about blooming,” she says. “The album feels like a journey towards that… by the end of it, I feel like I’m in that state of blooming”.

For her fans, Peters’ appeal is in her lyrics – personal, diaristic, and packed with punchlines that make you feel like you’re in on the joke. Her writing process, she tells me, depends on the song: “Often it starts with a title - that’s quite a natural way in.” But not always – some tracks arrive fully formed, almost unexpectedly: “‘My Regards’ just came out of nowhere. Nick [Lobel - who has also written with Harry Styles and Miley Cyrus] played me this piece of music and it just spilled out of that… it felt very country and western, very Runaway Bride.”

Other songs are more deliberate: “There’s one called ‘You Then, Me Now’ where I had the chorus going in. I’d bring it into the room and say I think this could be interesting to try today” And then there are the ones she circles for a while before getting right. “‘Audrey Hepburn’ - I knew I wanted to write about that feeling of going back home and how my actual relationship sort of revolves around that, about going back home and being rooted again. I tried a few times before it became ‘Audrey Hepburn’.”

I wonder whether she worried about outgrowing that style of lyricism her fans love, the kind that seems like it was plucked straight from a fluffy journal with a lock attached. She doesn’t. “The music I’ve always loved has been very lyrical, dense and rich and warm,” she says. “Sort of sad, but joyful.” She traces it back through her influences: “ABBA, Lily Allen, Taylor Swift, My Chemical Romance… The Black Parade is so narrative-driven.” For her, it’s less a phase than a foundation: “If that’s been true for the last 10 years,” she says, “I don’t really see it changing.”

I ask if there’s a song she wishes she’d written? She doesn’t hesitate: Lana Del Rey’s “Norman Fucking Rockwell”, and specifically, the line, “your poetry’s bad and you blame the news / but I can’t change that and I can’t change you.” (Her karaoke song of choice? “I Will Survive” by Gloria Gaynor, “sung really badly”).  

Like her idols - writing from experience can get complicated. Take Lily Allen’s West End Girl, which addresses very private details of her relationship with ex-husband David Harbour. When your material draws on real people and intimate moments, which then get shared with millions, the lines can quickly blur. “I’ve been like, I can’t put that in [the song], it calls someone out,” she admits. It’s a line she’s constantly navigating: “It’s a balancing game, making music about your own life… because I really believe it’s my art and my story to tell. I’m not pulling punches to save someone else’s feelings; it’s my version of events. I’m not claiming to be the teller of the absolute truth. I’m just telling my truth.”

That perspective shapes how she looks back on her own work, too. “Songs are like mini time capsules,” she says. “Feelings change, I’ve literally experienced that.” She points to The Good Witch, much of which was written in the aftermath of a breakup that no longer feels quite so immediate. “Years later, I have very different feelings about it, but as I literally say in the song [“Holy Revival” – which calls out a man Andrew], it's not about Andrew, it's what he represents. But I think at this point in my life I'm really enjoying writing autobiographical music. I'm really enjoying chronicling my life and getting to then have these time capsules of music to look back on”. She laughs and admits, ‘But it was brave of me to keep Andrew’s name in”.

I tell her I saw a TikTok she posted, where she reveals part of The Good Witch was written about a seven-week situationship - not the years-long relationship I’d assumed. We laugh and I tell her, “Girl, I’ve been there.”

It’s no surprise that when it comes to heartbreak and love, love - she tells me - is much harder to pin down. “I definitely find it harder to write love songs than heartbreak songs,” she says. “I think it’s because real love is so complex. It’s a big feeling, but it’s also really small and intimate. Healthy, long-term love isn’t that dramatic, it’s warm, it’s calm. And that’s harder to capture than something really heightened or emotional.”

“I think it’s a bit scarier,” she adds. “And it’s something I’ve just had less experience with.”

Over time, though, even those heightened emotions start to shift. “The songs cease to be about the people or the times,” she says. “They become about the rooms you’re playing them in.” “Lost the Breakup”, she explains, no longer takes her back to the relationship that inspired it, but to the crowds she’s sung it to. “It’s not even about the breakup anymore!”

It’s a way of reframing something that female artists - especially those who write in detail about their own lives - are still judged for. Swift has spent much of her career being picked apart for writing songs about relationships and the men in them, a scrutiny rarely applied with the same intensity elsewhere. Peters recognises that imbalance: “Yeah, definitely,” she says, when I ask if that judgement still exists. “There’s a specificity that women write with, a nuance that feels rarer.” She pauses, careful to qualify it. “There are incredible male songwriters, of course… but I do think there’s something in the female writers I listen to that feels rawer.”

I wonder aloud about how long she’ll keep mining her own life for material. “Will I do that forever? I mean, I almost hope not. I hope that I get to experience so many other ways of being creative. I read Rebecca when I started Florescence, and I loved it. And for a while, I really was like: I want to make the musical of Rebecca, but it's already been made,” she laughs.

Music, though, clearly remains the path Peters is set on. Throughout our conversation she’s bubbly and softly spoken - until one moment that catches me off guard. “I’m constitutionally made to be a pop star,” she says, suddenly louder and more assured. “I come alive. I’m fairly even-keeled, and my nervous system does a pretty good job. I don’t really get stage fright, I can stay calm. I’m good at collaborating, good at listening. I think I’m eloquent, good at expressing myself, and good at leading a team.”

It comes across as a pitch, but she’s not trying to convince anyone. The confidence in her voice is earned from years of experience and not from cockiness. Manifestation and fate are themes that ran through The Good Witch, and Peters has already decided on the outcome – not in a wishful way, but in a matter-of-fact one. I must look shocked by her frankness. “I think it’s important that we hear women say those things, for us to be ambitious publicly”, she concludes.