Taken from this week’s Future Pop mailer. Click here to subscribe.
I’d heard Maggie Rogers mentioned a few times but it wasn’t until I saw blogger (and Future Pop subscriber – hello!) Disco Naivete tweet that she’d gone from 1k to 120k Facebook likes in a WEEK that I got on with checking her out. The reason this impressed me so much is that Facebook isn’t the natural home of tastemakers, so it’s proof that despite being an alternative artist she has serious mainstream appeal. This all happened because her song Alaska went viral on YouTube and even ended up on the front page of Reddit, after she played it (see below – skip to 18:00) in a Pharrell Williams masterclass at NYU’s Clive Davis Institute. Her background is in folk, but she fell in love with dance music while in Europe (hey Americans – we’re always happy to help with this!) and merged the two in a creative way that inspired Pharrell and listeners around the world. The studio version of Alaska isn’t yet released, but new fans have been discovering her earlier, less electronic but still quite lovely, material on Spotify and Soundcloud.