For nearly a decade, Maisie Peters built her career soundtracking the chaos of growing up – the heartbreaks, the spirals, the yearning, and the often messy emotional aftermath of young love. From wearing her heart on her sleeve on You Signed Up for This (2021) to unpacking the fallout of heartbreak on the self-described “twisted version” of a break-up album, The Good Witch (2023), she’s consistently hit the nail on the head when it comes to capturing the emotional rollercoaster that is a person’s late teens and early twenties.
But on her new album Florescence, out today via Warner Music Group, the British singer-songwriter is re-emerging in a very different light. More grounded and self-assured, Peters’ third studio album captures an artist blossoming – pun intended – into adulthood.
Emerging during a rare period of stillness for the 25-year-old, Florescence was shaped in the aftermath of a whirlwind 2024 that saw Peters open for Taylor Swift, tour alongside Coldplay, Noah Kahan, and Conan Gray, headline her own tours, and make her Glastonbury debut. After spending such formative years on the road, she made the conscious decision to step away from the popstar carousel and return home, reconnecting with the quieter parts of herself and the life that existed beyond performing.
Slowing down and resetting, she tells Rolling Stone AU/NZ, ultimately became the foundation of Florescence – although she didn’t fully realise just how much she had changed until the album was complete.
“I think you often don’t know you’re growing until you’ve grown,” Peters tells me. “I wouldn’t say that I cognitively was aware of that whilst making the album, but it became very clear to me once finished and looking at it as a whole body of work. I feel like an older version of myself.”
As longtime listeners will hear, Florescence marks a significant tonal shift. Peters’ songwriting has long thrived in emotional chaos, but this record feels much calmer. “I feel the most comfortable in myself, in the music that I’m making, in the shows that I’m playing and the way I’m talking about and promoting this album,” Peters says of this new era. “I feel the most at ease. I feel the most comfortable and it feels the easiest it ever has.”
Love Music?
Get your daily dose of everything happening in Australian/New Zealand music and globally.
Now 25 (hardly retirement age, to be clear), Peters is actively embracing growing older rather than resisting it – something she acknowledges can feel almost radical within pop music’s relentless obsession with eternal youth.
“I want this album to feel like the album of a woman,” she smiles. “I wanted to make music that really embraced aging and embraced changing and growing and becoming who you’re meant to be.”
Nowhere is that sentiment clearer than on “Audrey Hepburn”. When I point out a particular line from the song, “I wanted to be immortal, now I’m fine with growing old”, Peters immediately lights up, agreeing that it seems to summarise the album’s broader themes perfectly.
“I love that lyric too,” she smiles. “I’m not trying to make music that I would have made when I was 20 or 17. I’m trying to make music that reflects who I am now. In a broad sense, that [lyric] really refers to how I feel about myself… It felt like a cool statement to say.”
Peters, importantly, doesn’t speak about earlier versions of herself with embarrassment. If anything, there’s deep affection there. Having released music since her teens, she says she’s proud listeners can trace her growth across nearly a decade of songwriting. “I want to make that girl proud and I never want to leave her behind. I like to think there’ll always be a little bit of all those versions of me in all the music that I make.”
Florescence instead focuses on healing and happiness, which Peters admits writing from that perspective felt unexpectedly vulnerable in its own way – especially after I point out to her that pop music thrives on devastation. “It was challenging and a bit nerve-wracking to make an album about happiness,” she admits. “That’s a harder emotion to write about.”
After all, heartbreak had become deeply tied to both her songwriting identity and audience expectations – for years, fans had gravitated towards the specificity of her break-up songs, relating to the spiralling inner monologues. “It felt scary to try something new and hope that people came with me for that and still wanted to listen to that type of music and that type of feeling.”
Sonically too, there’s a shift. Peters says she found herself gravitating towards music that felt joyful during the writing process, intentionally building songs she could imagine people smiling along to live.
“I feel in myself this real desire to listen to music that feels and sounds joyful,” she says. “Even though there are softer, folkier, sweeter moments on the album, I needed to have songs there that felt joyful that I could imagine playing to a crowd and them smiling. That was really important.”
Thankfully, fans appear more than willing to follow her into this next chapter. Peters admits she’s been overwhelmed by how warmly listeners have embraced the album thus far – through singles “Audrey Hepburn”, “My Regards”, “You You You”, and more – as enthusiastically as the songs that first made her famous.
Maisie Peters’ Florescence is out now via Warner Music.
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source au.rollingstone.com ’
