On 15 September 2021, Maggie Rogers delighted fans with a surprising tweet. The indie pop darling, who shot to worldwide fame in 2016 when a clip of an awestruck Pharrell Williams discovering her music went viral (8.2m views on YouTube), had been keeping a low profile. “Where have you been?” asked a fan on Twitter. “Lol i’m in grad school,” Rogers replied with a photo of a student ID card; Margaret D Rogers was enrolled at Harvard University. She had just begun a master’s programme, researching ethics in pop culture.
Ever since she was a final-year music production undergraduate and Williams had made a surprise visit to give notes on work by her New York University class, Rogers’s life had been a whirlwind. She toured her album, Heard It in a Past Life, performed sold-out gigs, appeared at awards shows (she was nominated for best new artist at the Grammys in 2019) and made a splash at Glastonbury and Coachella. It was exhilarating. “Everything happened, and more than I ever could have dreamed of,” she recalls.
It was also tiring. “After those four, five years of really intense touring, I was really burnt out. I had only been working. I hadn’t lived a life,” she says. We’re in the lounge of her central London hotel. She is layered in golden jewellery, her necklaces dangling over a frilled white button-up, bringing to mind a glam vintage rocker. “I wasn’t wearing this” – a sweeping gesture at her outfit – “at Harvard,” she laughs. Though as she speaks, she bears the quiet and thoughtful intensity of someone who shows up to class having done the reading.
Going to graduate school was a way to restore some normality. She rode her bike to class, steamed broccoli in her small kitchen; one night, walking home, she heard a thumping student party, knocked on the door and went in (it turned out to be a party for one of the university’s infamously exclusive Final Clubs). She worked on her thesis, titled Surrender: Cultural Consciousness, the Spirituality of Public Gatherings, and Ethics of Power in Pop Culture, on the responsibilities of the musician as an individual who brings people together, and their role in dismantling oppression.
Surrender is also the title of her new album. She started work on it in early 2020, while at her parents’ house in Maine during the pandemic. “I made bread and went for walks and read a bunch,” Rogers says, “and then suddenly was like: ‘Oh, there’s this thing I love doing to pass the time. It’s making music.’” She built a studio over the garage and began to work: “I wrote 100 songs for this record.”
Those 100 have been trimmed to 12 on an album that celebrates the act of disappearing into something greater than oneself: into love, into friendship or the sweaty ecstasy of a dancing crowd. An early single, Want Want, in which Rogers sings about desire against a roaring synth reminiscent of Black Sabbath’s Iron Man, is “about sex – no real other way to say it”, she wrote baldly in an Instagram post. “It’s a song about really wanting to have sex with someone and doing it.”
Rogers has called Surrender a “pandemic album”. It feels like one, in the sense that its songs ache for the feelings of embodiment, exuberance and community that had been made so rare. “I wanted sensuality, I wanted touch,” Rogers says of making it.
She typically starts work on her albums by piecing together images; the visual moodboard for this album included “a really caked-on, gooey red lipstick; a silver jacket, shining as if it was hit by a car light; a lot of teeth; jaw; collarbone”. She grasps at the air as she narrates. Another inspiration was New York, the city that Rogers lived in for six years and where she feels most at home.
The album may seem like a departure from her previous work. Alaska, the song that rendered Williams speechless, was inspired by a formative hike Rogers made there as a student. In it, the singer pays tribute to the state’s icy streams and glacial plains, against the sounds of a cooing dove. On the cover of Heard It in a Past Life, an album that was made during a two-week whirlwind as she confronted her sudden fame, the musician is draped in a red scarf, standing against a dusky blue sky on an open plain.
Rogers has expressed bemusement at being seen as a “nature girl”, as if she were a long-haired, bell bottom-clad flower child. Surrender’s cover is a closeup of her eyes, in stark black and white, dusted by the fringe of her pixie cut, and its songs are a tribute to the bustle of New York. Was this her way to bid farewell to the “nature girl”?
“No, because none of these decisions for the record were made in relationship to the press,” she says. “I think the nature girl was really funny. It’s a symptom of something greater, which is the desire to make things simple.” She adds that she doesn’t think cities are “unnatural” and that the “desire to create that binary, city/country, doesn’t really work”.
She has moved between the two, having grown up in rural Maryland, where she took up the harp, piano, banjo and guitar. “I didn’t have a cellphone, wifi or TV until I was 18.” The first night she arrived in New York for university, “a woman came up and asked if I had a cigarette, and I did not. And she turned round and dropped her pants and showed me her asshole.” Rogers has since come to love the city but, early on, it was difficult: before New York she “had never met anybody that had alternative motives before; I thought anyone that was nice to me wanted to be my friend”.
Rogers does not consider herself naive any longer – “because if you’re naive and you live in a city, you get punched in the face” – but admits she is “terribly earnest”. Joy is an important component in her life, and on Surrender. “Despite the world, despite the systems of oppression, despite the darkness, saying that you’re alive, and that you can claim that agency, that’s really important to me,” she says. “And really something that, to me, seems like our only hope in the cynicism and destruction and death of it all: to find joy, and to find ways to reassert life.” She has announced a tour across Europe – it is called Feral Joy.
I ask her what she makes of the experience of going viral, six years later. “I was so overwhelmed for so long,” she says. “It was the thing that asked me to develop a sense of spirituality” – to accept that things will happen to her that she might never understand. There is a feeling that – after months of isolation and lone cliff walks, writing songs in her parents’ garage, burrowing into books in university libraries – Rogers is emerging out from under a long shadow. Her first album, which she still loves, “felt like me very much trying to meet the world. Where now I feel very much like: ‘This is where I’m at. Do you want to meet me here?’”
Surrender is released 29 July.