Album Review: Maggie Rogers Unrepentantly Frees Her Emotions in ‘Surrender’

Maggie Rogers comes back with her very intimate, yet beautifully loud sophomore album Surrender.

Written by Isabel Alvarez

It has been a long three years. With the pandemic, continual examples of injustice, and everything in between, simply existing feels like a reminder of the gloom and tenseness that lingers over so many. But even with great feelings of grief and sadness, many, like Maggie Rogers, have found ways to combat pain with the fighting power of joy. Three years after her debut album, Heard It in a Past Life, Rogers announced her sophomore record Surrender with a video reading of her poem by the same name over snippets of the opening track, “Overdrive.”

Rogers has been no stranger to vulnerability in her music, but this time, it feels different. Instead of letting out her feelings to rid herself of the uncomfortable, she relinquishes them to own them. This record, having stemmed from times in the height of the pandemic, discusses on multiple occasions how her numbness, at the time, was crushing. After returning to Maine, she went on a search to figure out what it means to her “to live a beautiful life.” From that, she went to Harvard to study religion in public life, and as a result, some of the big questions she asked translated their way into this album.

Rogers has made it known that this record very much revolves around “feral joy,” even naming her European tour as such. By this, she means her joy is the “greatest form of rebellion.” Yet, the strongest tracks on this record are the ones where happiness does not appear at the forefront. Despite several songs being painful and angry, her letting out that emotion has allowed room for bliss to find its way in and “makes [it] feel earned.” In “Horses,” Rogers cries out how she wishes she could experience freedom when so much is telling her that it isn’t possible. In the second verse, she sings: “Thе truth about dreams / is they're a feeling that meets you in between / What you want and what you really need.” The track, which had its vocals recorded in only one take, has a timeless sense of longing, as well as rawness to its desperation for being anywhere but where she is at. Looking at “Begging For Rain,” the song has a sickening tension of feeling like everything is too much despite trying so hard to tame the chaos yourself. The ballad’s minute-long outro leaves you sitting feeling a weird sense of faithfulness despite acknowledging the overwhelming feeling of the world, with a trickling flute noise fading to drum beats marching as Rogers delicately carries her vocals out into quiet.

Another unique aspect of Surrender is the way it paints the idea of hope. In exclaiming such pure elation, it can be really easy to slip into a rose-colored world, but Rogers does an amazing job both sonically and lyrically with keeping her head both above the water and below the clouds. In “Anywhere With You” and “Symphony,” Rogers sticks by someone she loves while they are going through a hard time, in one song by taking them out of the familiar and the other by bringing them to the people and things they know and love. “Anywhere With You” feels like the soundtrack to a coming of age movie without the cheesiness, and “Symphony” feels like an artful lullaby. Even while trying to help someone to the light, she admits her own moments of darkness and anxieties: “You tell me you want everything, you want it fast / But all I've ever wanted is to make something f-cking last.” Both of these tracks’ instrumentals feel like they are running from something, with “Symphony” feeling like the fervor of a bow racing across a fiddle and the beat to “Anywhere With You” feeling like it could accompany watching the streetlamps pass while staring out a car window, but even then, the unconditional love of someone else helps keep hope around.

Part of tackling her emotional vulnerability is the turmoil that comes along with it, but Rogers proves that there can be beauty in self-serving chaos. In her second single, “Want Want,” she emphasizes the “power of prioritizing pleasure” and owning your feelings, with the pounding drums and synth giving it an anthemic feel. The seventh track, “Shatter,” features her vocals untamed over an energetic, 90s-esque pop rock melody, with background vocals and tambourine by Florence Welch complementing the havoc. The song is about using passion, stemming from adolescent rage, for love. None of the songs invite feelings in, rather they make room for them to take up the space they deserve as they come and go, and both of these tracks are great examples of how truly big those emotions can be.

The album beautifully ends with a reminder that Rogers is by no means the same person she was during her Heard It in a Past Life era. In the closing song “Different Kind of World,” she reflects briefly on how the state of the world has impacted who she is and is becoming. She repeats “When we’re riding all together / I’m a different kind of girl” through an unaccompanied and softly strummed acoustic guitar, soon joined by a chorus of muffled vocables, then drowned out by a buzzing that leads to loudly pulsing drums and electric guitar, and finally the silence comes back as she utters the line for the last time. The closing leaves such a pure sense of hope despite everything, which is really powerful.

Looking at the full album, Rogers’ combines a lot of distorted and rigid noises with raw and purposefully playful vocals, which feels like a 180 from her debut record, yet still very true to her and her voice. Surrender has a versatility in the joy it brings, and for that, this album feels so true to what it is like to be happy in a world that gives you a million and one reasons not to be.