maggie rogers

this woman is gonna have a crazy long and successful career. heard it in a past life was an amazingly self-assured and well-crafted bit of festival pop, highlighted for me by the slight touch of rocksteady in 'overnight,' and the sun-drenched guitar on 'back in my body.'

haven't heard the new song yet.

she is i think better live than on record - i really enjoyed her show back in may and that "fallingwater" snl performance still slaps. nothing else on the album for me reached the same pinnacle as that song but i still really liked it and i guess it'll make my year end list.

this new song is fine, kind of shaggy and loose and not my favourite but as a bookend to the era it works.

yeah, really surprised by these songs' longevity for me - way moreso than other MOR radio pop of recent months, from Carly Rae Jepsen on down

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WdrNXRdkuG4

new single is decent

that's an understatement. it's great

i like this much more than anything else I've heard by her since Alaska. Nice seeing David Byrne pop up in there on his bike. I like how he's just been randomly showing up lately (he plays a doctor in Amy Schumer's Hulu series also)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SylF32J2g8k

another very good one

i loved maggie's last album but none of these new singles do it for me
reminds me of how latterday sharon van etten feels so laborious and overproduced, the springiness all weighed down with gravitas

I love the distorted production on this.

These songs are extremely busy and melodramatic, but an unrestrained approach works for me here. I particularly like the part in the newest single where it sounds like a piano is falling down the stairs.

really good album!

New York Times article has me curious---

Remembering that “making beats is fun,” she joined a virtual song-a-day accountability group with the likes of Feist, Damien Rice and Mac DeMarco. “I would go for a walk and then listen to all my favorite artists make some [expletive] in our kitchens,” she said. “It was so sick.” The demos she produced in her own home studio sounded joyful, which surprised her.

She thought the tumult and rage of the moment would lead her elsewhere. And then it did.

“I talk so much about the artist’s job being to feel,” she said recently. “Feeling through the last couple of years — there’s been so much pain and so much suffering and so much injustice in the world. It brought up a lot of questions for me about what I believe, and how I want to structure my artistic practice or my business. Or my life.”
So Rogers, while she was busy concocting sick beats in her kitchen, enrolled in Harvard Divinity School. “I wanted to build a framework for myself, for how to keep art sacred,” she said.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/24/arts/music/maggie-rogers-surrender.html

The video for the propulsive, synthy first single “That’s Where I Am,” with a bed of glitches and handclaps underneath Rogers’s clarion vocals about desire, pays tribute to that, as she catwalks through downtown Manhattan in a green boa, and piles into a cab with a New York crosscurrent — club kids and office workers. (The guitarist Hamilton Leithauser, the photographer Quil Lemons and David Byrne, who she cold-called to collaborate, show up too.)

Her musical process starts with making a mood board. “In production, I always think of records as world building — if I understand that, what the world is, it’s way easier for me to understand what the bass should sound like,” she said.

Kid Harpoon, the British producer, with whom she co-wrote her 2018 single “Light On,” remembered that the images for “Surrender” included black-and-white grittiness and ’70s New York

surprised there's not much discussion of this here really because it seems like something people here should really like

I haven't heard the new album yet, but everything I've heard by her previously has been underwhelming and stops this being a priority listen. On paper this is exactly my sort of thing but I find it hard to form any connection to what I've heard from her.

it's a bit of a shift from where she was before, it's a bigger & bolder sound, kinda late 90s heavily processed pop-rock? you'll know if you like it based on the singles

I like the album and I like her, but it's been hard to properly devote time to it given that Renaissance came out on the same day.

I'd group this with other vaguely-big-sounding-90s-alt albums that have come out this year - the new Soccer Mommy, Eliza and the Delusionals, Hatchie, beebadoobee - there are probably others I'm forgetting, enough to loosely classify as a trend I think.

Had hopes for this, but some of it is too alt pop-rock samey

Yeah, I'm having trouble getting into this too. On paper it sounds right up my alley, but it all kind of just washes by.

It's kind of monochromatic in a sense, but once you click to its frequency it's all great.

I feel like leaning on Kid Harpoon for the whole album did her few favors. He's a good fit for some of the songs, but I think some of the others could have benefited from other producers.

I like this album ok, but the production is very samey. Great for a song or two, but there's not enough variety to sustain a whole album.

That's Where I Am is a pretty bingeable single. That big '90s fuzzy bassline with bombastic drums really works for me.

otm re the production