Heard It in a Past Life

Her singing provides the album's highlights. The instrumentation and production only serve to accent her voice and sadly often detract from the experience.

The Kurstin tracks are as irresistible as you’d expect if you know his track record, but the assortment of other co-producers who drift in for a track or two also serve her well and know enough to place the beauty of her voice starkly in the forefront.

While it sometimes feels like Rogers could be even bolder than she is on Heard It in a Past Life, it's a strong debut that shows how well she's growing into her fame as well as all the dimensions of her music.

It sticks in the mind for a good while after and just keeps bringing you back in with fantastic production, brilliant pop songwriting and a central personality as easy to like and support as any on the current music scene.

Rogers rises to the occasion, making herself and her mixture of emotions the anchor of songs whose music moves at an unending pace.

Rogers never once loses sight of that story [perpetual self-change] on Heard It In a Past Life, and the result is a laser-focused statement with nary a wasted lyric or synth line.

Rogers is well on her way to inhabit the bright spotlights of stardom with her affecting lyrics, strong vocals, and gorgeous soundscapes of dance floor filling tunes.

The record finds a way of making her atypical pop sit comfortably in the mainstream, offering something genuinely new. Coming a long way since sitting adjacent to Pharrell in the studio at NYU, Maggie Rogers has certainly found her own voice.

This thoughtfully constructed and often enchanting record manages to mark itself out from the crowd. [Feb 2019, p.110]

On the intoxicating Heard It In A Past Life, Rogers sounds in love with art, nature and life itself.

The charts are starved for something real and down-to-earth, and her songs, while heavily produced in comparison to some of her folksier beginnings, have an earnestness to them that can’t be fabricated. Rogers’ career may have first sparked on the internet, but now it’s a fire burning IRL.

The magic by which we were all spellbound in those early days remains, now augmented by a newfound range of diverse influences. Rogers writes anthems for the modern age, with all the paradoxical feelings of empowerment, anxiety, heartbreak and growth that that entails.

Rogers is listed as coproducer throughout, but her distinctiveness only comes through when Kurstin and some of his other high-profile production accomplices (Kid Harpoon, Ricky Reed) take the day off. ... In contrast, Kurstin--with Rogers listed as a co-conspirator--swamps many of the remaining tracks in virtual choirs of wordless backing vocals and squiggling, squirming keyboard and synthesizer textures.

Individuality has been smoothed out by production and a lack of lyrical diversity. Undeniably a star, Maggie’s light has been dimmed here.

Heard It in a Past Life is evidence of Rogers’ ambition and potential, but it is proof, too, that you can’t bottle lightning.

Her percussion is often mesmerizing, the glue holding it all together. It’s all cinematic in a broad sort of way, the kind of album you can put on and walk through the streets, imagining how the movie of your own life would unfold. Thematically, it swerves through early 20-something existential angst in a rather predictable and trend-chasing way, which starts to lag and feel samey in the album’s second half.

The whole thing is deeply marketable--but there's an authenticity in Rogers that needs more space to breathe. [Feb 2019, p.92]

The palette can feel restrictive, and the lyrical matter predictable. It’s a stepping stone, a moment of reconciliation and recollection from a talent who is just about to surge ahead.

While often precious, it’s never bad or incompetent, but there’s a frustrating sense of bets being hedged, particularly once the more ambitious production gives way to mildly anguished stadium boom towards the end.

Production touches aren't enough to elevate a set of songs that when stripped to their skeleton are sufficient if unspectacular. [Mar 2019, p.32]

The best songs – Give a Little, Say It, On + Off, lean harder into the hip-hop grooves, Rogers’s strong and soulful voice gaining a bit of grit. Overnight and The Knife, however, fall into melodic predictability, Fallingwater drowns a more interesting structure in ersatz gospel and Past Life, the overportentous, dragged-out ballad at the album’s heart, reminds you that viral doesn’t always mean catchy.