One of the great things this blog has stumbled into is having a high concentration of bangers fans among our readership. Most blogs have a lot of bangers fans reading them—who doesn’t like bangers, after all—but The Barking Crow has been blessed with an especially high number of you, which is why we feel compelled to tell you about Maisie Peters, in case you don’t already know.
There’s some disagreement over how broad a term “banger” is. Some characterize the poppier songs getting love in our annual bangers brackets as “bops” rather than true bangers. Peters definitely fits into the “bop” category, so let’s apply that grain of salt. With that established…
Peters is electric.
21 years old and British, Peters has been releasing singles since 2017. My impression is that she started as a YouTuber, and that in typical Gen Z fashion, she’s big on TikTok (I tried to check her TikTok following just now, but TikTok made me do the captcha verification eight times and still hasn’t let me in yet, and I don’t want to open the app on my phone because I don’t want to turn my volume down and I also don’t want my puppy to know I’m awake yet and start barking for me to come let her out of her crate so we can play). Regardless, she’s been releasing tunes for over five years, and lately, she’s been releasing bops. Or bangers, depending on your preferred parlance.
One of the latest, “Psycho,” comes from her debut studio album, recorded on Ed Sheeran’s label. That’s a good place to start. Another good place to start is with “I’m Trying (Not Friends),” which was originally going to be on the soundtrack for Apple TV’s Trying (which Peters wrote at what seems to me a young age for writing TV soundtracks but maybe I don’t understand England) but ended up too “chaotic, bitchy, and passive-aggressive.” “Maybe Don’t” is good and has some banger/bop vibes. From there, it gets more into softer things—lot of acoustic ballads and songs of that sort in her earlier stuff (and there is a ton of earlier stuff, the woman is the 21st century subject of that Hamilton song about writing like she’s running out of time)—but I know bangers fans need the gentler music as well, which is why we’re here. “Milhouse” is a good song for when you’re trying to feel optimistic on a bad day.
The thing that’s surprising me about Peters, and the reason I’m blogging about her, is that she hasn’t charted yet in the United States (she did recently tour here—didn’t come to Austin, which was/is sad). Yet every Taylor Swift fan I tell about her (I think I first ran into her stuff on a Taylor Swift-adjacent Spotify binge) gets obsessed. So, spreading the word. Maisie Peters slaps. Get on board now before the British Isles pass us by.
