Not the horror movie the weekend called for…
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[6.50]
Leah Isobel: I did not expect concrete evidence of Hannah Diamond’s impact from an Ed Sheeran protegée, but in retrospect that’s less of a leap than it seemed from the vantage point of 2014. It’s fun for me, personally, to hear a melody this gratingly chipper over synths this chintzy in a song that could actually get radio play somewhere. It strains uncomfortably against the song’s dynamic push toward triumphal catharsis, though. When Peters goes for a kind of girlboss narrative resolution over a scratchy funk guitar, it’s dispiritingly conventional: in the end, the pop industry will eat everything alienating, everything human.
[5]
Lauren Gilbert: If Olivia Rodrigo is one of the first fully post-Swift pop stars — an artist who clearly grew up listening to “All Too Well” and “Blank Space” on repeat — Maisie Peters is our first post-Sheeran pop star. With his co-writing credit here, it’s hard to tell where the Maisie quips end and the Sheeran ones begin, with far too many syllables jammed into single lines. But the comparisons aren’t entirely negative — you can hear the same intuition for an earworm here, the kind of endlessly hooky melodic line that made me look for more of her work before the song even ended. Her lyricism, too, echoes Sheeran at his best; wordy, yes, but also emotive – “you made me feel so useful then so used” might be a one-sentence summary of some relationships I’ve had. “Psycho” might not quite reach Swiftian emotional depth, but you can see Peters getting there.
[8]
Claire Biddles: So robotic that it’s hard to imagine real people wrote, produced and performed it, but not in a good way. Maisie Peters’ vocals feel purpose-built to irritate me specifically; a combination of little-girl-BBC-English-voice and affected-Halsey-retching-voice, just abysmal.
[2]
Tim de Reuse: This variety of tightly produced and crisply enunciated vocal delivery usually strikes me as sterile in pop songs, but here it is leveraged to play a magnificent trick: Peters is the rational actor in the room, running circles around a shitty ex, and the precision adds to the sensation that she’s fifty steps ahead of him and everyone else. It blooms in the details, the closer you look; there are too many clever lyrical flourishes to list, but the absolute best is the cheeky bend in her voice through “Call me / Psy-cho.” As an earworm, it’s magic — the harmony, the sheer number of times it repeats, the obnoxious over-accent on the first syllable even though she’s not actually rhyming it with anything. One gets the feeling that as a songwriter — much like the hyper-competent character she is playing — she knows exactly what she’s doing.
[9]
Dorian Sinclair: The horror movie riff at the start of “Psycho” is a great kick-off. The rest of the production is much more conventional, but well done, and Peters’ clipped delivery suits the barbed lyrics really well. On the face of it, “Psycho” isn’t doing anything that special — but it delivers on its promises, and that chorus has ended up being way more catchy than I thought it would be the first time I heard it.
[7]
Nortey Dowuona: The strings got me. Then when the jabbing ’80s synths touched down, skipping along with the claps, the drums hammer down. But Maisie isn’t bothered, just hoisting them and draping them around her shoulders, using them to block the weirdo who keeps trying to string her along.
[9]
Iain Mew: The underlying message — if you say all your exes are psycho, what does that say about you? — is well-trodden enough that she doesn’t feel the need to spell it out in full, which is good. That doesn’t stop the narrative from getting predictable, and her means of keeping it interesting doesn’t immediately work. With musical material largely consisting of one synth string loop and one nagging five-syllable phrase, she’s basically constructed the anti-“Call Me Maybe”, never leaving any space for those hooks to breathe. It only finally pays off when the level of filling every gap reaches virtuoso levels, at the line about two phones that crashes back into “one to still call me psycho”.
[6]
Anna Katrina Lockwood: “Psycho” is a rather tidily composed slice of post-Jepsen pop. There’s not a lot to it outside of handclaps, boppy synths jouncing up alongside Peters’ crisp vocals, and some very selectively deployed guitar. She clearly has a lot to say, and that comes out as a speedily uttered, jam-packed lyric sheet — maybe a little overstuffed. I do however admire her skill in briskly and precisely pronouncing all of the things she wants to state — full marks on vocal exactitude. I don’t know if it’s just my suggestible brain latching on to her English accent, but the overall effect is somehow almost prim? The entire composition is generally youthful and quite charming, if not so sticky — a refreshing little summer pop song that will surely disappear from my brain in much the same way the leaves are currently disappearing from the deciduous trees of the Northern Hemisphere.
[6]