Maggie Rogers Essentials

Maggie Rogers entered the public imagination in 2016, when, as a student at NYU’s Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music, she played her track “Alaska” during a master class with Pharrell Williams, leaving Williams stunned. (“It’s like when the Wu-Tang Clan came out,” Williams said. “You either liked it or you didn’t, but you couldn’t compare it to anything else.”) By that time, Rogers had already pledged herself to music—she’d been playing banjo and harp in folk idioms since childhood. But a transformative experience with dance music while studying abroad in Europe pushed her to explore a hybrid of folk songwriting and club music—a sound that merged the naturalism of her roots with the liberating, primitive promise of the beat. Airy, intuitive, and boundlessly expressive, here’s the sound of Maggie Rogers.