By summer 2024, Maisie Peters had officially won the pop game. She had the number one album, courtesy of the previous year’s The Good Witch, making her the youngest British female solo artist in nearly a decade to hit No. 1 on the UK charts. She had the A-list co-signs via Phoebe Bridgers, Sam Smith and Olivia Rodrigo. She had a fiercely devoted fandom, the Daisies, who flocked to headline tours around the world. And she’d played some of the most coveted gigs and venues in the music industry, from Glastonbury to stadium slots with Taylor Swift and Coldplay.

“All of that time just blurs into one,” says the 25-year-old. “The Good Witch was so special – it sustained me and pushed me forward nearly two years.” The follow up to her debut album You Signed Up For This, the sophomore record elevated her from from “One To Watch” to Force To Be Reckoned With, thanks to her potent concoction of layered, diaristic lyricism and the kind of earworm pop hooks that are near impossible to press skip on. From Melbourne to New York, the Daisies hung on every word, singing along as if in mass incantation.

But as much as Peters loved the whirlwind of life on the road, it began to take its toll. In late 2023, she developed vocal polyps, impacting her ability to perform. “Right after, I went on this big American tour and when I came back, it was straight into the UK tour, which ended at Wembley [for The Eras Tour]”, she explains. “At the time, I didn’t know I had vocal polyps – I could not sing on that tour, but I didn’t know why. I just had to push through.”

Peters handled it like the pro she is – an artist with a decade’s experience performing, from busking on the streets of Brighton age 15 to commanding the Pyramid stage at Glastonbury. Yet even she couldn’t avoid the fallout from a viral clip of a shaky note during one of the Swift dates. Criticism poured in thick and fast. Suddenly, an all-time career high clouded by the weight of online opinion, made all the more sharper by her pride at sharing the stage with one of her greatest inspirations. “It was the best day of my life and then you’re waking up to thousands of comments, people saying really horrible things,” she says. “I went to Birmingham [to support Noah Kahan later that week] and I cried during my sound check, because I was so worried that I sounded bad.”

A few months later, Peters decided to step back from the stage, pulling out of a North America tour with Kelsea Ballerini that autumn to protect her mental health. “It was such a tough decision,” she remembers. “I’ve cancelled one show in my whole life. I never thought that I would be in that position, but I was just too mentally unwell.”

Instead, Peters pressed pause on the pop-star carousel and returned to the everyday rhythms she’d long left behind. She moved in with her sister and boyfriend in East London, and spent the year visiting her family back in the small Sussex town of Steyning, returning to the local pub with childhood friends at Christmas, showing up at birthday parties she’d usually have missed. “I wasn’t being Maisie The Artist,” she says. “I was just being a sister, a daughter, a friend and a girlfriend. Those things really brought me back to who I am as a human being.”

A homecoming of sorts, this period didn’t only remind Peters of her humanity; it guided her back to who she is as an artist. “It really instilled my roots – of where I’m from and who I was when I started writing songs at 12,” she says. Now, as she prepares to return to the spotlight, the artist is ready to show the world the “most distilled version of myself.”

What does that sound like? Lyrically, a sense of inner peace and hope anchors this next chapter. Peters has always been a songwriter who wears her heart on her sleeve, earning the trust of the Daisies with unfiltered lyricism that draws back the curtain on modern girlhood through heartbreaks and healing. But over the past year, she’s been exploring those themes with renewed clarity, reconciling her insecurities and extending compassion to her lost loves. “There’s a real sense of stability,” she says. “I think the underpinning of [this era] is acceptance of yourself – love, warmth, grace and radical acceptance.”

On new single “You You You”, that shows up as a gentle reflection on the fallout of a past breakup, acknowledging the hurt without bitterness – letting go while carrying the lessons forward. “I’m very happy in my relationship presently, but I sort of let my mind wander back to how it felt in the throes of heartbreak, thinking about how it felt to have everything you do infected with sadness,” she explains. “The benefit of hindsight is knowing how to describe how I was feeling. It’s about being in the thick of heartbreak, but written from a place of being out of it.” Sonically, it’s a return to her roots too, with subtle country-leaning production that places her vocals and guitar front and centre, just like the first songs she ever wrote at age 12. “I’ve always loved pop music, but I started out quite folky and country,” she says. “This really feels like the most ‘me’, in terms of the sound. The first song I released when I was 17, ‘Places We Were Made’, could probably exist in this world.”

Also released, “Audrey Hepburn” shows up as a tender love song, but the emphasis is more on how the relationship makes the artist feel about herself, rather than the relationship itself. “I wanted to be immortal, now I’m fine with growing old,” she sings softly. “I was chasing phantoms / Always starving, never full / Then, you made me dinner / Where there was push, now there is pull”. For Peters, “Audrey Hepburn” bottles up the emotions stirred by returning to her childhood bedroom, mirrored sonically in the country-leaning production that puts her vocals and guitar front and centre, just like the first songs she ever wrote aged 12. “It’s about finding that old version of myself, but also shaking off what was and stepping into something new,” she says, “realising that there’s a spring approaching.”

The past year has been the longest Peters has ever stepped away from the limelight in a decade of making music. She’s lived a smaller, more ordinary life and rediscovered herself in its simplicity. Now emotionally, physically and creatively restored, her pen has been sharpened by a period of reflection, her artistic purpose renewed with a quiet confidence that seeps into every chord. For Maisie Peters, this isn’t just the beginning of a new era. It’s a reminder of why she started – a testament to the old, while clearing space for what comes next.