"Florescence": Maisie Peters album review

Maisie Peters finds the love of her life and lays the grief of past loves to permanent rest on her third album, Florescence. Following a three-year gap between this album and her last, the British pop singer – one of my all-time favorite artists – branches from dance-pop into the folk-pop world. Florescence is made for cozy bonfires, morning walks in nature, and the scent of the house you grow old with your lover in.

I rate Florescence an 8/10.

The Florescence album cover

Maisie shifts away from her usual method of opening an album with descriptions of how she tries to manage pain, instead singing in “Mary Janes”, “It doesn’t matter, oh man, anymore, who gives a fuck when I’m in love?” She sets a precedent for the album right off the bat with “Love, when it’s the right kind, well, it always points you home” in the lead single and second track “Audrey Hepburn”. In “Vampire Time”, she follows this up vibrantly, singing of a right-person-wrong-time situation that eventually found its time when she re-visited her hometown.

Maisie gets philosophical after establishing she’s in love. With “Houses”, she contemplates what life would be like if she’d settled for less in relationships. Like how I fear some insecure teenagers will think Maisie is tearing down other women in “Mary Janes” when she references letting go of her insecurities of not being an “it-girl”, I worry that listeners might take “Houses” as a diss on suburbia and marrying young. She describes settling as giving up“the high road”, but she isn’t mentioning “the high road” to act superior to those who choose that lifestyle. She’s simply warning others to make sure a particular relationship is what they really want before they turn it into something bigger. Maisie then discusses her influence on past partners’ successes in “Kingmaker (with Julia Michaels)”, “They'll take my crown, head out west, and forget their creator”. The song has splendid instrumentation but is a little corny: “Watch him ride around, fucking weird behavior”. Maisie summarizes the philosophical aspects of the record in the album closer, the comforting piano ballad “Nothing Like Being In Love”. She describes all the things a past relationship didn’t have in common with her current one.

The slow breakup songs, laying the grief of past relationships to rest for good, are gold. “You You You”, opens a cappella and maneuvers words gracefully, “I eat about you, so I weigh less than when we met”. “If You Let Me (with Marcus Mumford)” shatters me. Maisie leans into her head voice in the verses, providing an itch-scratching harmony with Marcus’s lower notes as the lullaby-like song progresses. “Flat Earther” reminds me of early Taylor Swift, as Maisie gracefully pulls an “eye-ee-eye-ee-eye” sound out of her throat. The lyric, “There’s nothing like a girl and her favorite conspiracy” guts me as Maisie discusses delusion.

The single cover for "You You You / Audrey Hepburn"

On the other hand, the more upbeat heartbreak songs are good but not stomach-turning. “Say My Name in Your Sleep” contains a similar notion to Fleetwood Mac’s “Silver Springs”. Maisie sings, “You can change the lock, but I will never quite leave you.” She follows up with “Old Fashioned”, portraying an interesting absence of an “everything happens for a reason” sentiment. She drills repeatedly, “I wish you’d never happened” as she hurts on behalf of her ex’s future lovers. “You Then Me Now” is the only true moment of redundancy on the record; this is the final track in which Maisie talks about delusional habits that led to breakups.

“My Regards”, “Questions” and “Girl’s Just Flying” are good additions to the album but give me a pause thanks to their shifts in sound. The first, a possessive love song, is in a disproportionately ominous key. This is slightly jarring following the optimistically written and instrumented “Vampire Time”. I actually really like that she put them back-to-back, but it took me a moment to reach that conclusion. “Questions” sounds a lot like Maisie’s earlier work, but I’m not sure that the album needed that dance-pop homage. “Girl’s Just Flying” could’ve been in a Disney movie. It does the same job at describing letting go that “There It Goes”, a track from her sophomore album The Good Witch (2023), does, but is lyrically weaker. I love the guitar riff, though.

I'm ecstatic to build cozy memories with this album as summer begins. Stream Florescence on all platforms now.