Back in 2014, when Maggie Rogers was an intern at Spin magazine writing about other people’s music, she kept a running list of good descriptive words. “I had a document on my computer of crunchy adverbs and adjectives,” she told me in late October as she prepared to leave on the international leg of her Feral Joy tour. Music writing, Rogers knows, is notoriously difficult to do well; capturing the feeling of a song can sometimes feel like writing a whole new one. When she talks about music (her own, or that of an artist she admires), Rogers often ends up invoking sensations—smell, color, mouthfeel—in ways that can feel synesthetic. That’s on purpose. “Music is this thing that you don’t get to see,” she says, “so you have to rely on all the other senses to try and tell anybody what it was like.” These days, Rogers may be the one being written about, but she’s still doing her damnedest to make sure that you catch her drift.
After exploding onto the music scene in 2016, courtesy of a viral moment with Pharrell in her NYU classroom, Rogers put out her first album, , in 2019. She spent the pandemic writing and recording new songs, and getting her master’s degree in religion and public life at Harvard Divinity School. In late July 2022 she emerged with , a love letter to loud, messy nights and hard mornings-after that feels like a real embrace of full selfhood spurred on by a period of isolation. Songs about sex, love, community, fear, rage; the desire to get lost in a crowd, in a moment, in a swell of feelings—it’s all there, laid out and ready for the taking, preferably in the kind of all-consuming concert thrum and thrash it was written for. It’s a little messy, and a lot human, and, anyways, that’s the whole point. “There’s
