GRAMMY Award-nominated producer/songwriter/performer Maggie Rogers returns with “That’s Where I Am,” the explosive first single from her new album, Surrender through Capitol Records/Universal Music Canada, the country’s leading music company. Her powerful, emotive vocals glide over a shapeshifting sound that melds electronic, acoustic and electric elements to joyous effect. Rogers wrote and produced “That’s Where I Am” with Kid Harpoon. The track was recorded at Electric Lady Studios in New York City and at Peter Gabriel’s Real World Studios near Bath, England.
The official video for “That’s Where I Am,” co-directed by Rogers, Michael Scanlon and Warren Fu (Daft Punk, Dua Lipa, The 1975), is a love letter to Rogers’ adopted hometown of New York City and its vibrant, diverse energy. She strides confidently through the city, engulfed in crowds and encountering a few notable New Yorkers – GRAMMY, Oscar and Tony award winning artist David Byrne, photographer Quil Lemons and singer-songwriter Hamilton Leithauser – on her way to a powerful, skyscraper-lit nighttime performance.
Maggie Rogers, who will perform at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival on April 17 and 24, said, “That’s Where I Am” is a story I’d been carrying around for many years, the story of a love that had been with me and unfolding for a long time. A lot of the events that Surrender chronicles take place in New York City. In the stark solitude and distance of covid, it was the backdrop for all my claustrophobic fantasies. The proximity and pleasure of just staring at strangers. The way a night could unfold. Events that interrupt your day instead of having to consciously and deliberately make each decision. I longed for someone to sweat on me. Spill their beer on my shoes. Be too tall for me to see at the concert. The city’s music and attitude was a big source of inspiration for the record. For all these reasons, there was only ever one place we could shoot the video. I’ve always said that New York is the city that winks back. It’s a main character. It’s a friend, a lover, an enemy sometimes. In many ways, the music video is about that New York love story. And on those filming days, it felt like the city was on our side. We got our first taste of true New York spring. That feral downtown explosion when suddenly everyone’s smoking on the sidewalks in short sleeves and drinking gin and tonics. The appearance of a few classic New York characters – David Byrne, The Walkmen’s Hamilton Leithauser, and photographer Quil Lemons – made the daydream feel complete.”
Surrender, which will be released by Capitol Records/Universal Music Canada on July 29, is available for pre-order HERE. Fans who pre-order the digital album will instantly receive “That’s Where I Am.” Surrender is the follow-up to Heard It in a Past Life, her massively beloved 2019 album, which entered Billboard’s Top Album Sales chart at No. 1 and debuted at No. 2 on the Billboard 200. Praised by the likes of NPR, The New York Times, Rolling Stone, Pitchfork, TIME Magazine, and many others, Heard It in a Past Life landed Rogers a nomination for Best New Artist and went on to amass over one billion combined global streams.
In early 2020 – after multiple sold-out headline tours and major festival performances in support of Heard It in a Past Life – Rogers retreated to the coast of Maine. As she immersed herself in deliberate stillness, she eventually felt called to create music with the same sense of playful, open exploration and internal discovery that made her fall in love with writing and producing music back in high school. Channeling the ocean’s unruly energy, she soon arrived at the controlled chaos and ecstatic physicality that would come to define Surrender.
Over the course of 12 unfettered yet exactingly crafted tracks, Rogers fully captures the frenetic intensity of the last two years of her life, bringing her bracing honesty to stories of anger and peace and self-salvation, transcendence through sex and freedom through letting go. Surrender is her most joyful output yet: a body of work built for the sweaty immediacy of live performance, raw and revelatory and primed for shared abandon. View the album trailer, which Rolling Stone described as “a poetic retelling of the album’s journey,” below.
