Consumer Guide Album

Maggie Rogers: Surrender [Capitol, 2022]
It so happens that in early 2016 I briefly tutored unmistakably bright-and-a-half NYU senior Rogers, whose plan to write an Alanis Morissette 33 1/3 was shelved when Pharrell Williams, then artist in residence at NYU's Clive Davis Institute, heard something in "Alaska" that made her the biggest star the Institute has ever turned out. But it wasn't until early 2019 that Capitol dropped her Heard It in a Past Life album, which I'm not the only one to find overcooked the way multiproduced major-label debuts can be. So I was chuffed to learn that instead of rushing to follow it up Rogers took time off to earn a master's at Harvard Divinity School as she pretty much less simultaneously came up with this cleaner and more focused long-player. Sonically, although with input from Harry Styles producer Kid Harpoon I bet, the music here bears the mark of a singer-songwriter who also leads her own band. Not that it's anything like spare. But despite its orchestral dimensions it projects plenty of detail--strident, yet so intricate that its intensity has a well-wrought delicacy to it. Although the themes are more emotional than erotic, there's plenty of eroticism in there--some spirituality with an appetite for permanence too. At 28, Rogers is no longer any kind of post-teen. You can tell. A-