Maggie Rogers, Don’t Forget Me review: Escape into windows-down soft rock that brings to mind Fleetwood Mac

Maggie Rogers wants her third album to “sound like Sunday morning, feel like your favourite pair of blue jeans... easy”. Warmly crafted with woody guitars, companionable vocals and richly rolling beats, these songs do have a distinct weekend vibe to them, complete with all the existential musings that come with extended downtime – and the need to bolt when you’re stuck in your head. As Rogers turns 30 this month, Don’t Forget Me finds her marvelling at friends getting married while she’s still figuring herself out, defiantly declaring there “ain’t no diamond ring you could buy me to take me home”.

Rogers made her name in 2016 with “Alaska”. It was with this deliciously distinctive, electro-folk single that she knocked the socks off Pharrell Williams when he dropped in for a masterclass at her New York university. Her first two albums – Heard it in a Past Life (2019) and Surrender (2022) – yoked together the free, acoustic spirit of the outdoorsy kid growing up on the shores of Chesapeake Bay with the party-animal persona she tapped into during her time in Berlin. At times, though, its mainstream pop production airbrushed over Rogers’ quirky talent. Surrender found the country girl rocking out in karaoke bars “sucking nicotine down my throat/ thinking of you giving head”.

Written over five days – three in December 2022, two in January 2023 – Don’t Forget Me sees Rogers relaxing into herself. Most of the final recordings, she says, are first takes from her sessions with co-writer and co-producer Ian Fitchuk (who plays most of the instruments on the record). Both the title track and the hypnotic “Sick of Dreaming” bounce off casually interlocking electric guitar hooks that recall the windows-down soft rock of Fleetwood Mac in their pomp.

On the former, Rogers refers to the various romantic entanglements of her friends and shrugs cheerfully at her comparative restlessness. It sounds like she’s calling back to Joni Mitchell’s “Song to Sharon”, on which the singer passes bridal shops, laments the death of a friend, and heads for new horizons and new lovers. “Close the door and change the channel/ Give me something I can handle,” sings Rogers, abandoning herself to a lover who will “take my money, wreck my Sundays/ Love me ’til your next somebody”.

There’s a sloshy murk to the guitar sound on “Drunk” and “The Kill”, which brings to mind college bands like The Cure. “It Was Coming All Along”, meanwhile, echoes the exhilarating mixed emotions of Simple Minds. There’s a little electro-crunch in the rattling percussion that drives Rogers even as she acknowledges a warning: “Maggie, slow your roll.” It’s a cool thing to hear those electric Eighties British sounds wired into the acoustic country mood.

Rogers’ voice catches a snag of a husk on “On & On & On” as she looks back at a time when she was “overrated/ understated”. She yelps a little against the mid-tempo strum of “Never Going Home”, on which she sings of jumping off a cliff. Rogers has spoken of imagining these songs in the mouth of a millennial Thelma or Louise, and certainly you can feel that fearless escape here. Although the pleasant chugger of a melody isn’t quite powerful enough to launch Rogers too far from the canyon’s edge, it’s good enough to keep fans’ fingers tapping their steering wheels.

“I Still Do” is a tender bar-room piano ballad, evolving gently from desperation to acceptance as Rogers’ voice soars dreamily cloudwards and she realises that “love is not the final straw”. “Time moves slow,” she mulls on the porch-swing ballad “So It Goes” – the piano taking on an almost Norah Jones-esque elegance in its silky-sad sway. It’s good to hear Rogers settling into herself. On Don’t Forget Me, she’s found a beguilingly relaxed momentum.