Maggie Rogers Gives In to Every Feeling on Surrender

Is a concert really so different from church? If you’ve attended both functions and felt a similar glimmer of something—humanity, joy, meaning, etc.—then you’re likely to respond with “No.” Whether people congregate in the name of God or guitar chords, it’s a means of connecting with oneself and something bigger. And there is perhaps no secular artist more aware of this synergy than Maggie Rogers.

The now-Grammy-nominated pop singer, while attending a 2016 songwriting masterclass in college at NYU, famously overwhelmed Pharrell Williams with her sensational folk-pop song “Alaska.” Since then, she’s released an EP and her debut album Heard It in a Past Life, toured them relentlessly, weathered the cultural upheaval of the last two years, and graduated from Harvard Divinity School with a master’s degree in Religion and Public Life. Rogers is quite literally an expert on how spirituality intersects with community. But Rogers’ HIIAPL follow-up, Surrender, doesn’t explicitly spend much time working through that idea, or get lost in trying to understand the wild course her career has taken. Rather, Rogers simply follows her instincts. She gives in to her desires and her ideas by way of dance-y pop tracks and Americana-inflected notes packed with joy and truth. The resulting album still leaves plenty of room for spiritual experiences, but it twinkles with something you won’t find in most houses of worship: uninhibited freedom.

There’s no doubt now that the now-28-year-old would’ve found her way into the spotlight even without that serendipitous moment in an NYU classroom six years ago. “Alaska” was just a fast track to where she is now. After a hectic few years of touring, the Maryland-born Rogers headed for Maine, where she recorded some songs in her parents’ garage, laying down the others at Electric Lady Studios in New York City and Peter Gabriel’s Real World Studios in the U.K. Rogers goes big on Surrender. Even though we won’t hear all 100 contenders Rogers wrote in recent years, the melodies, ideas and emotions on the songs that did make it onto Surrender are all newly expansive, driven by one defining question: “Oh, could you just give in?” In a culture that constantly tells us not to feel too much or be overly emotional, to fight off ugly urges, messy feelings and embarrassing joy, Rogers asks us to surrender to it all.

The desperation in Rogers’ desire to let go can be heard in every song on the album, which swings between heightened, blazing indie-pop—something in the neighborhood of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs—and twangy, alt-rock-ish swagger, like if PJ Harvey and Regina Spektor hung out with Wilco for a day or two. For the first time, Rogers sounds completely unbound. She opts to explore the rough edges of her voice over investing in the smooth pop sheen of HIIAPL songs like “Say It” and “Retrograde.” On Surrender opener “Overtime,” she simultaneously masters a lower register and belts above the noise; on “Horses,” which is like a city-slicker cousin to The Chicks’ “Cowboy Take Me Away” she sings with full force, unbothered by any imperfections. And her chants of “Are you ready to start?” on “Anywhere With You” are urgent and fueled by the assertion, “All I’ve ever wanted is to make something fucking last,” which also feels like an apt thesis for an album about searching for something real.