Florescence

The Roast

“"Florescence" is a perfectly competent third album from a perfectly competent British pop girl who has now been on the cusp of breaking through for so long that the cusp itself has become her genre. Maisie Peters writes the kind of confessional, witty, slightly literary pop that sits in the exact middle of the Venn diagram between Taylor Swift, Gracie Abrams, Holly Humberstone and Olivia Rodrigo, except she does it with the politeness of someone who still thanks the barista by name. The songs are well-constructed in that very 2020s way, verse-prechorus-chorus-bridge-chorus, key change implied but never delivered, every line ending on a clever turn of phrase that sounds great in a TikTok caption and slightly less great in your actual life. The production is clean acoustic-pop varnish, brushed drums, layered "ooh"s in the bridge, a piano that arrives exactly when contractually required. It is impossible to dislike. It is also, somehow, impossible to remember a single melody twenty minutes after the record ends, which is the curse of being the seventh-most-recommended artist in a Spotify algorithm built to keep you mildly entertained but never genuinely surprised.”

The Bright Side

She is genuinely one of the sharpest lyricists in this lane, and when she lets a line breathe instead of decorating it, the songs land. The album is sequenced like someone who actually thinks about albums, which is increasingly rare. And the Ed Sheeran cosign clearly bought her enough runway to make the record she wanted rather than the one a major would have A&R'd into oblivion, so credit where credit is due, the artistic control shows.

Hardest Sneer

“Calling your third album "Florescence" when the songs themselves are mostly mid-bloom is the kind of title only a literature graduate would commit to and only a publicist would defend.”

Issues (3)