The 28-year old US singer-songwriter finally got to perform her latest album in London – and the fans adored it
Thirteen songs into her Alexandra Palace set on Thursday evening, Maggie Rogers burst into tears. Not because of the Tube strikes or technical hitches that had thrown the night into slight disarray, but because of the hundreds of phone lights that met her plaintive ballad Horses.
“Damn, I got gone by phone lights,” the 28-year-old, Mayland-born singer-songwriter said with a laugh, explaining that she was overcome by finally performing her new album, Surrender, in London, after two years of longing. “I never believed it was going to happen.”
It wasn’t the first time the show drew to a halt. After Rogers leapt on stage in a minidress and cropped blonde hair to deliver the U2-ish anthem Overdrive and the catchy Want Want, a temporary technical snag hampered her six-piece band. She eventually resumed with the acoustic number I’ve Got a Friend, a goofy ode to friendship that sits out of place on Surrender but came to the rescue here.
Surrender’s loud, vocal hunger made the UK Top 10, yet its songs – not always so convincing on record – always seemed destined for a stage. The album leans heavily into turn-of-the-century alt-rock, retaining little of the folky electronica of Heard it in a Past Life – Rogers’s 2019 debut, on which she flexed the producer muscles acquired during her undergraduate degree at NYU’s Clive Davis Institute. The London crowd knew every word to her breakthrough hit Alaska, written during her studies and earning viral praise from Pharrell Williams in 2016.