Some albums are written in the eye of the storm. Florescence was written after it.
Maisie Peters’ third studio record, Florescence, arrives as something of a love letter to settling, to the version of yourself that finally stops shape-shifting long enough to be written down.
The 25-year-old British singer-songwriter has spent the better part of five years in near-constant motion, opening for Taylor Swift, Ed Sheeran and Coldplay, headlining three sold-out world tours of her own, making her Glastonbury debut and somehow finding time to launch a podcast with her twin sister Ellen along the way.
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But somewhere between the stadium shows and the tour buses, something shifted. “I think it’s an album I needed to make once the dust settled a bit, and I entered a more stable period of life and found a more consistent version of myself,” she tells me.
Her previous records, You Signed Up For This and The Good Witch, were critically acclaimed and deeply felt, the kind of records that make sense when you’re living fast and feeling everything at full volume. Maisie doesn’t disown them at all, she’s just got more perspective now.
“I absolutely think those were authentic, accurate representations of me at that time,” she says. “But I think it’s hard to capture a true, grounded, long-term version of yourself when you’re 19, 20, 21.”
What changed? Honestly, the ordinary stuff. Falling properly in love. Friendships that have started to feel permanent. Figuring out how to have a home life when your job takes you around the world for months at a stretch.
“All the things that everybody else goes through,” she adds. “Falling in love in a way that’s reciprocated, being in a real relationship with somebody else, touring as much as I did and seeing so much of the world, but living a very nomadic way of life, and balancing that with a home life.
“Now at 25, I’m really seeing who are going to be my people for a long time, and those people solidifying around me. I just happen to write music about all those things, so you see it more clearly, I think.”
Florescence was also shaped in part in collaboration with Julia Michaels and Marcus Mumford, two artists whose sonic worlds sit at pretty different ends of the spectrum.
Maisie is thoughtful about what each brought to the record versus the artists who have simply shaped her as a musician over time. Taylor Swift, she says, is a foundational influence on how she thinks about songwriting altogether, while Michaels and Mumford were active collaborators in the room.
“It was their minds and musical sensibilities that formed those songs with me. Musically, they’re so rich, the instrumentation is beautiful and unique,” she says.
Visually, Florescence marks as much of a shift as it does sonically. Maisie worked closely with her stylist to build an aesthetic that felt genuinely personal rather than performative, landing on a palette of denims, whites, browns and earthy tones, skirts, dresses and boots that traded spectacle for something quieter and more considered.
The brief, essentially, was clothes she could actually live in. “Do away with any shoe that made me nervous on stage,” she laughs.
It’s a softer visual language than fans might expect from someone who has shared stages with some of the biggest acts on the planet, but Maisie is clear that ease and confidence aren’t mutually exclusive.
The video for lead single ‘My Regards’, directed by Amelia Dimoldenberg of Chicken Shop Date fame and starring Benito Skinner, makes that case pretty convincingly.
“This album to me is a lot about confidence,” she tells me. “Lyrically and sonically, it’s confident and self-assured, and that suit I wear in ‘My Regards’ – it didn’t feel like something I could pull off in the past. So even stepping into that look and wearing something more powerful also felt Florescence in some way.”
Listen to Florescence here.
