The labels at Warner Music U.K., overseen by worldwide recorded-music chief Max Lousada, have been working on a number of new signings behind the scenes that are now positioned to gain momentum into next year and beyond. Amongst them are two Atlantic acts, Mahalia and Maisie Peters, both of whom are benefitting from a patient development process and showing signs of long-term potential.

MAHALIA

Mahalia has had a deliberately slow-burn development story over at Atlantic U.K., who signed the R&B singer/songwriter at the tender age of 14. Now 21, she’s reached a significant point in her trajectory with the arrival of her debut album, Love and Compromise, and a headline show at London’s 5k-capacity Brixton Academy early next year.

Then-Atlantic President Ben Cook signed Mahalia alongside MD Ed Howard, who tells us it was self-penned early track “Let the World See the Light” that caught their attention. “She had an amazing self-confidence and was an amazing performer and clearly an incredible musician,” Howard enthuses. “She had all this natural talent that was seemingly effortless and magnetic. It was all about her. ‘Let the World See the Light’ was a knockout vocal and a beautiful piece of music that really caught our attention. Then we met her, saw some shows and she was even better than the music. Her potential seemed massive.”

Mixtape Diary of Me, released in 2016, was a collection of songs that Mahalia had made whilst growing up, which helped lay a strong foundation at the streaming services. Atlantic released one track every fortnight for eight weeks, which “built awareness and fans and opened doors,” Howard explains. “It also built Mahalia’s confidence and allowed us to move on, release new music and put that stage of development to bed.” Since then, her development plan has been built around releasing music regularly, touring regularly and being “very active.”

One of the key moments in her trajectory so far was a stripped-back video recorded for Berlin-based music platform Colors of her “Sober” single, which was released in 2017. It has since racked up over 34m views, enabling Mahalia to sell tickets across Europe. CAA live agent Paul Wilson says: “She was a completely unknown artist before that, and after [the video], we could go and do shows in Paris, Amsterdam, Brussels and London, and sell lots of tickets. She’s just sold out the Roundhouse, and she’s about to go to Brixton Academy. She’s selling thousands and thousands of tickets to people because she’s exciting and she talks to a slightly different audience. It’s a lot of 16- to 18-year-old girls, which gives those shows a real kind of energy. I think she’s got a â€¨very exciting future.”

Love and Compromise hit #28 on the U.K.’s Official Albums Chart in September, and has generated over 140k combined sales globally, which Howard tells us ties in with a plan to continue her development away from mainstream noise. “We’re still in a building stage with Mahalia,” he adds. “Her music is incredible but by design not super-commercial—it’s very much in the space she wants it to be, talking to the audience she wants to talk to. She’s not trying to reach out and grab a mainstream audience too quickly.” Instead of focusing on units, Howard points to engagement. “With Mahalia, what we see is that every single song gets attention and gets listened to, so those who want to listen to her music want to listen to it all. We see tickets growing, social media growing, awareness growing in leaps and bounds—it’ll be a minute before that translates into really solid commercial metrics.”

The goal now is to achieve a critical mass of fans in the U.K. and other markets, “so when we release music, we’ve got a decent launch so that the records either stand up or not on their own merit,” Howard concludes. “Getting to that critical-mass stage where a fanbase will rally around a song or album when it’s released, and drive it up the charts so it’s very visible and drags more media in—that’s where we want to be. It’s good to see massive jumps up single by single and her profile being higher than it’s ever been around the launch of the album. She’s been our baby for a long time, we love her artistry and we’re all very proud of this album.”

MAISIE PETERS

Young Brighton-born singer/songwriter Maisie Peters was signed to Atlantic back in 2017 when she was still in college and has spent the last few years building a platform at streaming and live. Her “emo-girl pop” sound has been honed with producers including FRED and Two Inch Punch, who worked on her debut EP, Dressed Too Nice for a Jacket, which dropped in November last year.

She was signed by Atlantic A&Rs Briony Turner and Paul Samuels, while GM Katie White is part of the development team. Discussing the motivation to sign Peters, White tells us: “We discovered her at a time when she was putting music out on YouTube and the heat had just started building around her. The first thing we noticed was, of course, her music. She had already started to develop a strong sound that got us all feeling, but the standout thing was her lyrics.

“She was capturing really relatable moments and playing them back in a way that stopped you in your tracks,” White continues. “She had also started to build a significant following. We loved the way she interacted with her fans. She was building a community around her music and connecting really strongly, reflected in the fact that her numbers just kept steadily growing. In a climate where dark pop is the genre du jour, Maisie’s accessibility and relatable lyricism are creating her own lane. She is making observational pop that is connecting with her peers and soundtracking the lives of her rapidly growing fan base.”

At the end of 2018, Peters joined Tom Walker on his tour dates across U.K. and Europe, which White says delivered significant boosts to her profile across markets. The Atlantic sync team secured placements in British reality series Love Island for tracks “Feels Like This,” “Place We Were Made” and “Favourite Ex,” which boosted each on streaming and downloads, hitting the iTunes Top 50 chart and delivering “massive” Shazam numbers. Back in June, “Feels Like This” was Scott Mills’ Track of the Week on BBC Radio 1, which led to a C List playlist slot. Over the summer, Peters’ social numbers have tripled, and she’s now hitting 3.5m monthly listeners on Spotify. After sold-out dates at London venues Omeara and Scala, she played the 2k-capacity Shepherds Bush Empire in November.

The plan moving forward is to focus on developing a strong visual and continue to release music regularly, in the hope of charting a few tracks as the Atlantic team moves toward an album.