Maisie Peters

With her tuneful acoustic folk-pop songs and youthful charm, British singer/songwriter Maisie Peters earned a widespread YouTube following in the mid-2010s. In 2017, when Peters was 17, her debut single, “Place We Were Made,” became a viral hit, amassing millions of streams. Over the next couple of years, she released a pair of EPs, Dressed Too Nice for a Jacket (2018) and It's Your Bed Babe, It's Your Funeral (2019), all of which found her embracing an ever more sophisticated pop aesthetic. In 2022, she hit the Top Ten in the U.K. with her full-length debut, You Signed Up for This, before delivering more-effusive singles like “Cate’s Brother” and “Body Better.”
A natural storyteller who wrote her first song when she was nine, the West Sussex native began uploading her songs to YouTube in 2015, quickly earning fans and comparisons to artists like Birdy and Taylor Swift, the latter of whom Peters cites as an early influence. By the time she released the winsome “Place We Were Made” in the summer of 2017, her already loyal fan base helped the song go viral, resulting in widespread exposure and millions of streams. She followed up later that year with the similarly stripped-down piano ballad “Birthday” before returning in 2018 with the more polished and pop-oriented “Worst of You.” By year’s end, she had delivered her first EP, Dressed Too Nice for a Jacket.
The 2019 single “Favorite Ex” saw Peters reconnecting with her acoustic folk side, while her EP It's Your Bed Babe, It's Your Funeral was a full-on pop release. A slew of singles arrived in 2020, including “Smile,” “Daydreams,” and “Sad Girl Summer,” and in 2021, she released “Funeral” featuring James Bay, which appeared on her soundtrack for Season Two of the Apple TV+ original series Trying. Finally, in August of that year, Peters delivered her debut full-length, You Signed Up for This. A success in the U.K., it reached number two on the album chart, thanks in part to its lead single, “Psycho.” Several non-album tracks followed, including “Cate’s Brother” and “Not Another Rockstar” in 2022 and “Body Better” in 2023. ~ Timothy Monger