Album review: Surrender, by Maggie Rogers, ropes in Harry Styles' collaborator
Maggie Rogers, pictured here at Musgrave Park in Cork, has just released her album, Surrender. Picture: Eddie O'Hare
★★★★☆
One of Maggie Rogers' first encounters with an Irish audience was when supporting Mumford and Sons at Dublin’s 3Arena in 2018 (Cork people may remember her supporting Hozier at Musgrave Park in 2019). But while her early music certainly made sense set alongside the Mumfords' mutton-chopped folk, with her second record, Surrender, she has taken it in engaging new directions.
With the pandemic as a backdrop, Rogers delivers an intense, sometimes claustrophobic but always humane meditation on youth, ambition and friendship. She found the lockdown an ordeal and there is a sense throughout Surrender that she is trying to sing her way back to stability. She is also, clearly, taking a breath after a rollercoaster rise that began when Pharrell Williams praised her music at a song-writing class — a clip that went viral on YouTube and brought record labels banging on her door.
“It all works out in the end/ Wherever you go, that's where I am,” she sings on That’s Where I Am, a gusty autumnal hymnal that showcases both her expressive voice and her talent for songs that pass through a valley of darkness but always emerge, blinking, into the light.
Surrender is co-produced by “landfill indie” songwriter Kid Harpoon. He is better known today as Harry Styles' regular writing partner (after Styles, he receives top billing on the recent, Mercury-nominated Harry’s House). But on Surrender, he and Rogers are determined to keep the mood grounded and earthy — with occasional nods towards Alanis Morissette-style 90s angst balladry (Want Want).
The centrepiece of the record is Horses, a majestic torch song that has the same moss-hued sensibility as Taylor Swift’s Folklore. And yet it is also illuminated by a lyrical eye for detail (“Cross the street like a dream out my window/Sucking nicotine down my throat”) and by melodic ache. They confirm Rogers as a voice to cherish in her own right.
