PHOTOGRAPHY Aaron Paul Walker
Master Peace has always moved as if his success was already confirmed. Long before festival main stages and FIFA soundtracks, he and his friends carried a certainty that bordered on delusion: one of them was going to make it. There were nights skipping trains, wearing fake designer clothes, sneaking friends through guestlists, and insisting it all meant something.
Watching Marty Supreme recently, he recognised that same reckless conviction on screen; the instinct to dream past your circumstances and behave like the future has already arrived. “We always had spirit,” he says. “We always knew that we were going to get to this place. One of us was going to get there. You can’t stop this train.”
Now, on his new EP Stupid Kids, that old certainty has caught up with reality. Across six tracks, the record scales up his indie sensibility into unapologetic and raw territory; part British guitar lineage, part American maximalism, part Streatham-style refusal to fall into line. “I’ve always made indie-party music, but I’ve never really tapped into the insecurities of myself,” he admits. “I’ve never really gone into that, so it feels good to just be honest about it.” It’s raucous yet joyful, driven by the same belief that once looked naïve from the outside, and now feels earned.
Below, Master Peace shares the inspirations that shaped Stupid Kids.
Being labelled a “stupid kid”
The EP’s title is blunt for a reason. Growing up at a “really posh school”, Peace quickly learned how easily adults settle on a narrative. Behaviour that didn’t conform became a personality flaw; despite later receiving diagnoses for autism and ADHD, his classroom disruption was lazily labelled as stupidity by his teachers.
“My teachers would say: ‘He’s such a silly kid’ and ‘if he could just be a good kid, maybe…’,” he explains. “I was always just getting in the way, of – no, not even getting in the way, but I was always stopping myself from adjusting to what they wanted me to be. I was thrown into situations that I didn’t feel comfortable in, and it made me feel very isolated and picked on.”
Bunking off lessons, talking back, throwing wet tissues onto the classroom ceiling; whatever form his behaviour took, the point was never malice. Peace knew he wasn’t “bad”, but he also knew he didn’t fit into his teachers’ version of “good”. “I wasn’t going to call it Bad Kid, because I wasn’t a bad kid, but I used to just do stupid shit. I knew that I actually wanted to learn, and I wanted to be who I was going to become, but I just didn’t know how to express that, so it came out sideways.”
Reclaiming that language became the point. “For me, there’s such a negative connotation with the word stupid, but I wanted to embrace it,” he declares. Here, “stupid” shifts from insult to insignia, leading to a record dedicated to anyone written off too early. “I am a stupid kid, I’ve always been a stupid kid, but I’m a stupid kid that they pushed down for so long, yet I’ve managed to make something for myself that no one thought I could.”
On the artwork, he’s seen hopping out of formation on a football pitch, a visual refusal of the straight line he’s never managed to stand in. “I’ve never gotten in line in any aspect of my life,” he laughs. “I’m a bit of a disruptor; if someone says I can’t do something or I’m not allowed to do it, the likelihood of me doing it is very high. If you see the artwork, I’m jumping out of that line. I’m not in that line anymore. Even if I die trying, at least I know that I can sit down in my chair 60 years from now and say I did what I wanted to do, and I wasn’t in line. I made my own line.”
I am a stupid kid, I’ve always been a stupid kid, but I’m a stupid kid that they pushed down for so long, yet I’ve managed to make something for myself that no one thought I could.
Real recognising real
Declan McKenna’s feature on ‘Fuck It Up’ wasn’t assembled through strategy decks or label matchmaking. It started, as many of the best music stories do, with admiration from afar. Two years before they’d meet properly, McKenna played Peace’s track ‘I Might Be Fake’ on his Radio 1 artist show; a moment that landed just before his debut album arrived. “I was so gassed, because it’s like, Declan McKenna,” he beams. “This was massive for me.”
A polite thank-you DM followed, with no expectation or grand plan. When they eventually ran into each other in Reading Festival’s artist village in a queue for food, the idea of working together was floated lightly, almost hypothetically. Back in the studio, it wasn’t immediate magic either. The first track didn’t quite click, nor did the second. It was only when Peace sent over ‘Fuck It Up’ – the most unfiltered thing he’d started planning for the EP – that it landed. “He was immediately like, ‘Okay, this is more my shit’. He pulled up on time, had his verse ready and just laid it down. It was very organic; it wasn’t no label planning.”
That word keeps resurfacing when Peace talks about the last year: organic. Not forced upward momentum, but mutual recognition. AJ Tracey not only tapped him for a track but brought him out onstage at Glastonbury. Franz Ferdinand invited him onto a Barrowlands Live session cover of ‘Hooked’, which later appeared as part of a double A-side release alongside Johnny Marr. Even FIFA – once a distant teenage fantasy – came calling, with two tracks from Stupid Kids, ‘Spin The Block’ and ‘There’s No More Underground’, landing on the FC26 soundtrack. To mark it, he designed a custom football kit dedicated to “kids that everyone doubted.”
“Real recognises real is what I realised last year. The people that I’m looking up to and I’m a fan of are like, ‘yo, we fuck with you’. It makes me feel like, okay, what I’m doing is okay,” he shares. For someone who taught himself how to sing by mimicking Bastille in his bedroom, those endorsements carry a particular weight. “When I was coming up, I heard The 1975’s ‘City’ on FIFA for the first time, or ‘Helicopter’ by Bloc Party, and I always knew that I would love to work with similar artists,” he recounts. “Now, the younger me is like, bro, you’re so fucking cool. You’re valid.”
Real recognises real is what I realised last year. The people that I’m looking up to and I’m a fan of are like, ‘yo, we fuck with you’. It makes me feel like, okay, what I’m doing is okay.
Frat boy indie
Sonically, Peace wasn’t chasing what was trending – he was rewinding to the late-2000s moment when indie felt inflated with ambition. The era of blown-out synths and choruses built for shouted catharsis, rather than tasteful restraint. “I was listening to FUN, Gym Class Heroes, Asher Roth, and the first Bastille album a lot, because ‘Stupid Kids’ kind of feels like a Bastille-ish song,” he explains. “The actual song itself is very festival-set, very in your face.”
You can hear that momentum across the EP. There’s a certain high-gloss recklessness to it – the kind that defined MGMT’s early output or Empire of the Sun’s neon theatricality – but filtered through a South London lens. Rather than nodding to the era ironically, Peace leans in fully. “I pride myself on if I’m gonna do it, I’m gonna do it properly,” he says of emulating his favourite records. “There’s nothing worse than doing it and feeling like you’re doing it wrong.” The melodies are maximal, and the choruses are deliberately uncomplicated. It’s music engineered to travel, from sticky club rooms to daytime festival slots, without losing propulsion.
Even the co-sign came from within that world. “I was in with one of the guys from Empire of the Sun, and I was showing him the songs, and he was like, ‘Yeah, you’ve got it nailed’. For Peace, tapping into that sound isn’t about nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake. It’s about scale, and writing songs that feel big enough to drown out back-of-the-brain doubt.
If you actually listen to the words, you’re like, that’s not even a real word. That’s not even a real sentence in terms of the English language; that’s not how you put that sentence together. But I like that. I wanted to not really know what I was saying or doing, just know there was intention and feeling behind it.
Streatham via Los Angeles and Nashville
Most of Stupid Kids was shaped between London, Los Angeles and Nashville, with each location sharpening a different edge. In Streatham with Dan Carey, the renowned producer behind Wet Leg and Fontaines D.C.’s stratospheric rises, things felt urgent and instinctive. “Dan is just a maniac,” he says. “He’s just so good at what he does. That guy is a fucking genius.” Having tried to work together for years, the pair finally found studio time last year, with Carey bringing Bar Italia’s drummer Liam Toon into the fold.
Working with such acclaimed collaborators brought out a new confidence in Peace. “Even before Declan was on it, ‘Fuck It Up’ for me was the realist I had ever been on a song, and it was a freestyle,” he admits. “If you listen to the song, that was one take, and I didn’t write any lyrics down.” The validation from co-creators pushed him to double down on his idiosyncrasies, including ignoring conventional grammar. “If you actually listen to the words, you’re like, that’s not even a real word. That’s not even a real sentence in terms of the English language; that’s not how you put that sentence together. But I like that. I wanted to not really know what I was saying or doing, just know there was intention and feeling behind it.”
Meanwhile, in the US, he found himself translating UK youth culture in real time. “When I showed Nick LaBelle ‘Spin the Block’, he was like, ‘hey bro, what the hell does that actually mean?” He says the British slang phrase refers to going back to someone in a relationship. “The language barrier, us teaching each other shit, was so funny and so interesting.”
Whether he was working with Julian Bunetta and Steph Jones in Los Angeles or finishing the record back in London with Maverick Sabre, his perspective didn’t dilute to fit the room. The slang, the cultural references, and the rhythms of South London all stayed. “It’s bringing that UK energy to a place like Los Angeles and everybody getting it and understanding it,” he says of the validation he received across the pond. Even thousands of miles from Streatham, the voice remained unmistakably his.
Capturing the feeling of festivals
At the core of Stupid Kids sits an integral teenage memory: that first taste of being in a field full of strangers, buzzing with anticipation, with a night ahead where anything could happen. “I remember going to Reading Festival when I was like 16, and thinking about that feeling of excitement and knowing that something might go wrong when you’re there, but you’re going to have the best time with your friends,” he recalls.
That volatility, the sense that chaos and joy exist together, became the blueprint while he was writing. His choruses aren’t subtle; they’re engineered for collective release. “I was thinking about that a lot when I was writing this thing. I was asking myself, what would 16 year old Peace want to hear?”
What came out of that question was 6 tracks that don’t hold back; they aim high. For someone once told he was too much in a classroom, turning up the volume feels deliberate.
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