Maggie Rogers returned to the Armory in spectacular fashion on Saturday showcasing her 2022 record, “Surrender.”
The Feral Joy tour, in which she performs the entirety of her new album, marks her first U.S. tour since 2019. Rogers, known for her distinct mixture of folk and dance music, drew an intergenerational crowd to downtown Minneapolis’ famously tall and open-floored venue.
The opening track of “Surrender,” “Overdrive,” served as an overture for Saturday night’s show. However, it wasn’t until the second song of the show, the anthem “Want Want,” that Rogers truly brought the room to life with a hyped-up crowd singing along.
“Honey,” a song from her latest record, was met with an enthusiastic crowd response. Rogers coordinated the crowd to wave their hands along to the music as she performed the catchy vocal run at the song’s climax. This kind of crowd engagement showed that Rogers’ audience had spent a lot of time with her latest record. This is her first U.S. tour since the onset of COVID-19, and the passion was evident.
The show ran into a bit of a snag with the track “Love You For a Long Time” when Rogers had to restart the song twice due to onstage difficulties. The crowd supported her throughout the difficulties, cheering her on as she showed her commitment to giving her fans the best performance possible.
Rogers emphasized the personal nature of her music. Before she played the acoustic track “I’ve Got a Friend,” she shared the story behind the track.
“I wrote this song for one of my best friends as a birthday present. And she was nice enough to let me put it on the record,” Rogers said onstage.
Rogers brought Samuel Holden Jaffe of Del Water Gap, Saturday night’s opening act, onstage for their 2014 collaborative effort, “New Song.” The two musicians worked together at New York University, and Rogers was even a member of Del Water Gap early in the group’s career.
Later in the show, Rogers performed her most well-known song, “Alaska.” The song kick-started her career in 2016, after a video showing Pharrell Williams’ reaction to it went viral.
Even though “Alaska” definitely went down as a highlight of the evening, the crowd had even more enthusiasm for the lead single of “Surrender,” the slightly eccentric yet very catchy “That’s Where I Am.”
Rogers later ended the encore with “Different Kind of World,” the closing track to “Surrender,” and expressed her gratitude for the energy the crowd gave throughout the entirety of the near two hour-long set.
While the show could have been enhanced with a couple more of her debut album’s stand-out tracks (“Give a Little” and “Burning”), Rogers and her band delivered a great performance that highlighted her new material and brought the incredible sounds of “Surrender” to Minneapolis.
