Album reviews: Kim Petras – ‘Feed The Beast’ and Maisie Peters – ‘The Good Witch’

Kim Petras plays with innuendo on her debut album, while Maisie Peters marches us into sad girl summer

Kim Petras leaves little to the imagination on a record charged with erotica (Luke Gilford)

Kim Petras – Feed the Beast

★★★★☆

Subtle is not a word that Kim Petras knows. Ever since the German pop star topped Spotify’s global viral 50 chart in 2017 with her breakout single “I Don’t Want It at All”, she has cultivated a hot pink world of ridiculously fun electropop. Her much-awaited debut album, Feed The Beast, is characteristically stuffed full of high-tempo, dance-pop floor fillers tailored to carousing. Fittingly, the album has come out in Pride month. “Everything I drop is a banger,” Petras declares on “Uh Oh” – and there are plenty of shiny collaborations to back her up. Nicki Minaj raps on “Alone”; Griff co-writes “Minute”; and of course, Sam Smith appears for “Unholy” – their Grammy-winning, history-making hit for which Petras became the first transgender woman to receive the award.

Feed The Beast doesn’t take itself seriously. Petras has fun with sex and innuendo; the whole record is charged with erotica. There’s no time for seduction, however, and the somewhat comical lyrics (“My coconuts/ You can put them in your mouth/ My coconuts/ Watch them bounce up and down”) leave little to the imagination. The TikTok-ready track is reminiscent of Katy Perry’s waggish “California Girls”, evoking hyper-saturated images of whipped cream and cherry-topped bras.

A 2010s sickly sweet sound is present throughout Feed The Beast, only this time it’s merged with today’s hyper-pop genre, the industrial kind that Charlie XCX has become synonymous with. It’s all over “Castle In Sky”, on which popping synths and Basshunter-style bpms take you back to a Noughties club. Admittedly, with 15 full-length tracks, the record does run a little long. That said, there’s something alluring about such an unapologetic and candid album. And really, what else would you expect from Petras? Megan Graye

Maisie Peters offers a sunburst of pop synths and folk-inflected melodies (Alice Moitié)

Maisie Peters – The Good Witch

★★★★☆

“Millenium baby but you’re pretentious/ So you have a camcorder out of the Nineties,” croons 23-year-old Maisie Peters on “Watch”. It’s the third track on her cauldron-stirring heartbreak album The Good Witch, the singer’s second release on Ed Sheeran’s label Gingerbread Man Records, which she signed to following a split from Atlantic Records in 2021. Post (label) breakup, Peters is thriving. She offers a sunburst of pop synths and folk-inflected melodies, over which she scatters lyrical Gen Z dog whistles and casts hexes on exes. The title track “The Good Witch” is a Disney-worthy anthem. Its twinkly orchestra sets the scene for the saga that follows: heartache (“Lost the breakup”), self-loathing (“Body Better”) and yearning (“Two Weeks Ago”).

Angst boils across the record until the witch lets go, as Peters self-soothes at a residential studio in Suffolk. It’s easy to picture her wrapped up in a woolly sweater as she whispers: “The love we had was covered in snow/ I had to let it go” on album closer “There It Goes”. Finally and cathartically, she moves on. Some tracks on The Good Witch serve as incantations to manifest a better lover; others spit curses on past ones. All of them, though, convincingly set Peters up as the next musician to confidently march us into another sad girl summer. Ellie Muir