Maisie Peters on the album Florescence and her first O2 headline show in 2027

Maisie Peters played Reading Festival's main stage on August 29, five years after her last appearance there, and told NME afterwards that it felt like both yesterday and a million years ago. The last time was a surprise set on the now defunct BBC Introducing stage, on the day her first album came out. Coming back on the third one, to The Grid, she called full circle.

The set was a run through the catalog rather than a promotion of one record, a megamix in her words. She was on a bill she rated highly, naming RAYE, Jade and Slayyyter as company worth keeping, and covered Here You Come Again in tribute to Dolly Parton, who died four days earlier at 80.

Florescence, her third album, arrived in May and got four stars from NME. Peters said the title refers to flowering and that the record documents the year and a half she spent writing it, when she was falling in love and at home for the first time in four years after a long stretch of touring. The calm, in her telling, is audible in the music, and the album could not have been made without it.

It is also the first of her records to carry other artists. Julia Michaels appears on Kingmaker and Marcus Mumford on If You Let Me, both from writing sessions she had the time to book on this album and had not on the last one. She described Michaels as a hero she grew up listening to, and said she once went to a Niall Horan show mainly to watch Michaels open it.

In June she took the album to the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, the city where Florescence was made. She said she has watched a lot of Opry footage as a country fan and found it strange to arrive at soundcheck to a house band that had already learned her songs.

The show she has next is bigger than any of it. Peters headlines The O2 in London in 2027, a booking she said she cannot fathom yet and would not call a bucket list moment, on the grounds that a 16 year old writing a bucket list would never have thought to put it there. Asked what she is planning, she said horses, real ones, possibly instead of a stage. That date and the rest of the year's pop arena bookings sit in the tour guide, alongside her indie peers on the same circuit.