More about: Maisie Peters

She's currently touring the UK, culminating at the Isle Of Wight Festival in September. She's played with James Bay on the phenomenally popular The Late Late Show in the US, written and performed the soundtrack to Apple's hit series Trying and is signed to Ed Sheeran's label Gingerbread Man Records...yet Maisie Peters isn't a household name. Yet.

That should change very quickly though. This week, the 21-year-old singer-songwriter releases her debut album You Signed Up For This, a fun, frenetic, sometimes surprisingly moving ride through life and love as a Gen Z-er.

Peters, who hails from Brighton, started her journey as a musician "kind of haphazardly!" she tells me. "It definitely began as more of a hobby. I was 14, 15, and just writing songs because I enjoyed it. I'd recorded some songs and they were just sitting on my laptop, so my mum was like: 'why don't you put them out there?'. So I put them up on YouTube and they ended up being quite popular!" As Peters' following grew, she posted more music recorded for her new fans, soon to be known as Daisies.

"After maybe a year or so I'd gained a bit of a following: it was never massive, but always consistent. I was busking as well and bought my YouTube equipment with the money I made from that" she says. Many of Peters' early videos are still online. It's impossible not to smile watching this teenager performing in her bedroom knowing how far she's since come—her music videos now rack up north of 3 million views. Her first single, 'Place We Were Made', was released independently in the summer of 2017, followed by a second, 'Birthday', later that year. 

In 2018, Peters released her first EP, Dressed Too Nice For A Jacket through Atlantic Records, and the record brought her even wider attention. "We actually did the shoot for the artwork in a charity shop in Brighton!" she laughs. Her second, It's Your Bed Babe, It's Your Funeral, came out in 2019, and "was more about me figuring out who I was as an artist, sort of what my sound was like".

With You Signed Up For This, Peters has certainly found her sound. This is a remarkably assured debut album, 14 tracks that all sound like they could be from a second or third record.

To say Peters has had a whirlwind past 18 months would be an understatement. At the beginning of 2020 her song 'Smile' was featured in the DC Comics blockbuster Birds Of Prey, and she then composed the soundtrack to the second series of Apple's series Trying. Nine whole tracks, near enough album-length!

The pandemic didn't slow her down either. Much of You Signed Up For This was written in the past year too. "'Psycho' was the last song we finished, and I think the first was 'John Hughes Movie'. I'd say about 40 percent was done before the pandemic, and 60 percent since." Peters worked on 'Psycho', and a number of other tracks, with Ed Sheeran, who's since signed her to his label.

"Ed is just the nicest, most wonderful guy. He's fantastic to be around both personally and as a musician. Nobody ever has a bad word to say about him! Because he's been in the industry for so long he's the kind of person you want to be around when you're at the stage I'm at, he has so much knowledge and I learnt a lot from him. All through my career so far I've been constantly learning, I've worked with some really amazing people who I've learnt a lot from."

Much like Sheeran, Peters' songwriting oscillates between heartfelt sincerity ('Hollow' and 'Talking To Strangers' being two strong examples from the album) and slyly humorous, almost diary-like entries—it's no wonder she cites Taylor Swift as her biggest inspiration, excitedly calling her "the reason I started writing songs in the first place" in an Instagram post when Swift revealed herself to be a Daisie. Peters also grew up listening to "ABBA, Kelly Clarkson, Carly Rae Jepsen… there are definitely shades of all of them in my music".

For as many inspirations and influences as she has though, Peters sound is very much her own, a near-perfect balance of heartfelt, candid and self-aware, it's brilliantly reflective of the fast-paced, often turbulent lives that young twenty-somethings lead.

Among Peters' main strengths as a songwriter is her seemingly effortless ability to tell vivid, engaging stories which begin to play out in the listener's mind almost immediately. "I've always wanted to paint as clear a picture as possible with my lyrics" she says. The videos bringing those songs to life are equally imaginative, in particular the wickedly funny 'Psycho'. "I wanted to have a lot of fun with that, I wanted to do something like the videos I grew up with, particularly 'You Belong With Me' by Taylor Swift, which was sort of like a mini-film. We came up with this idea of a kind of cottage industry of girls who all look exactly like me getting revenge on the guy who had spurned me, and we really ran with it!"

There's a similar playfully macabre streak in the video for 'John Hughes Movie', which sees a Hughes-esque high school prom turn gory. Peters' idea for the video was for it to be "bloody, scary, like a Tarantino film but with cheerleading". The song itself is both upbeat and melancholic much like the video, a seemingly chaotic mix that Peters brings an irresistibly knowing charm to.

You Signed Up For This marks Peters out as a singular talent rapidly on the rise, an artist able to take the listener on a journey from love to heartbreak to revenge to clubbing in New York with fake IDs—and it all began in her Brighton bedroom.

You Signed Up For This arrives 27 August via Gingerbread Man/Asylum/Warner Records.

More about: Maisie Peters