It has generally been the case that members of boy bands have to say they are single, even when they aren’t, to increase their desirability among their ravenous fanbase. The singledom of Sussex’s Maisie Peters has a different kind of value to the young women who occupy the vast majority of the floorspace at her concerts. She’s dodging the same romantic bear traps as they are, and expressing the thrills and the pain more succinctly, inevitably with a singalong chorus to boot.
An aspiring teen novelist before she went the YouTuber route instead, and now in her early twenties, she has reached a level where she can play the Pyramid stage at Glastonbury on June 23, support Ed Sheeran in stadiums and headline Wembley Arena in the autumn. As she releases her second album she still hasn’t had a top 40 single, but well over half a million TikTok followers is a better indicator of her sway with the kids.
They’ll find no shortage of potential hit tunes here. Peters sounds like Taylor Swift about seven albums ago, exploring breakups and breakdowns in precision pop music with a hint of lively country on songs such as You’re Just a Boy (and I’m Kinda the Man). She has said that this album “all draws upon the same couple of months’ worth of experiences and inspirations,” in which case there must be one specific guy who’s getting a thorough kicking.
On Wendy, he’s Peter Pan, a perpetual child who makes her want to close the window. On the anthemic single Lost the Breakup, she’s telling herself she’s the victor on the romantic battlefield. Every time it starts to feel like the music is unadventurous and the story told a billion times, a barbed lyric leaps out and reveals that her babydoll singing voice can snarl: “You do press-ups and repress us;” “If he says he’s real, he’s not/If he makes you smile, he’s blocked;” “If it was a first kiss how come it felt like a snakebite?”
But as revealed on her early single Worst of You, on which she willingly signed up for a toxic relationship, for all the empowerment talk she’s also unafraid to show a darker side. On Body Better she expresses insecurity about another woman’s figure. On BSC she reveals, “You made me Little Miss Unstable and it broke me big time.” The Good Witch is a full, detailed picture of young womanhood in the 2020s, and it ain’t as pretty as it first appears.
