Maisie Peters’ third album ‘Florescence’ trades heartbreak fury for acoustic warmth, Nashville craft, and a hard-won emotional clarity
There is a particular kind of artistic growth that only becomes legible once an artist stops performing urgency and starts trusting stillness. ‘Florescence,’ Maisie Peters‘ third album, released May 22, 2026 via Gingerbread Man Records and Asylum Records UK, is that kind of record. After the combustion of 2023’s ‘The Good Witch,’ a chart-topping, grief-fuelled pop sprint that landed Peters a UK Number One and a support slot on Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, she did something quietly radical. By the end of 2024, the pace had become physically and mentally unsustainable.
She stepped back, left London, returned to the Sussex town she grew up in, and fell in love with her high school sweetheart. She wrote at least 60 songs. Then she went to Nashville. The decision to record ‘Florescence’ with Ian Fitchuk, the two-time Grammy winner behind Kacey Musgraves’ ‘Golden Hour’ and Beyoncé sessions, was not a genre pivot so much as a tonal recalibration.
Fitchuk’s influence does not impose Nashville on Peters. It draws out a warmth and looseness that her writing has always pointed toward without fully committing to. Crucially, it was also the first album on which Peters stepped into the role of co-producer, a development that hears plainly throughout: this is an artist who now controls her own temperature.
When the Anger Has Burned Off
‘The Good Witch’ was sharp and immediate, propelled by the kind of adrenaline that comes with processing pain in real time. ‘Florescence’ is what follows. The 15-track, 48-minute record does not erase that history. It metabolises it. On the stripped-back ‘Flat Earther,’ Peters compares the act of convincing herself an ex was in love with her to the resolute certainty of conspiracy theorists, a metaphor that lands with precision because it refuses pity. ‘Old Fashioned,’ a gently stomping piece of Americana, casts a withering eye at former partners and their ritual attempts to impress new women. The anger is still there. It has simply been refined into something colder and more useful.
The duet ‘Kingmaker,’ recorded with Julia Michaels, is the album’s most surgical moment. The two songwriters trade verses about men who celebrate strong women until those women become inconvenient, their “fucking weird behaviour” documented not with fury but with the flat, precise disappointment of people who have seen this pattern too many times to be surprised by it anymore. Peters also collaborated with Marcus Mumford on two tracks, including ‘Say My Name In Your Sleep,’ a folk-pop single co-written and produced with Mumford, where a finger-picked guitar line lifts the arrangement from gentle acoustic territory into something that breathes country air without losing its literary centre.
The love songs, ‘Audrey Hepburn’ and ‘Vampire Time,’ do not suffer from the self-consciousness that often afflicts pop artists mid-pivot. They are warm and specific. Peters told Apple Music that ‘Florescence’ is not “just an album full of love songs” but rather a document of “the process and journey and relationships and heartbreaks that take you to that.” That framing holds. The album earns its romantic resolution by not rushing to it.
Bloom, Slowly
Where ‘Florescence’ stumbles is in its length. At 15 tracks, the record drifts occasionally in its mid-section, where the calmer sonic palette can tip from contemplative into passive. Peters’ old bite, the specificity and speed of her best writing on ‘The Good Witch,’ is the thing that keeps each track from dissolving into one another, and when it recedes, so does the tension that makes this material interesting. A tighter edit would have served the album’s thesis more cleanly.
But the finale earns its place. On closing track ‘Nothing Like Being In Love,’ Peters delivers a line that distils the entire record: free of resentment, clear about the past, and settled in where she has landed. ‘Florescence,’ the word denoting the process of coming into flower, is exactly the album it promises to be. Peters is not performing healing. She is already on the other side of it.
Rating: 4/5 (Gingerbread Man Records / Asylum Records UK)
