Reflective of its recording process, Don’t Forget Me sets a zippy, dare I say groovy, pace. Rogers often sounds like she’s outrunning the ghost of an old flame, whether she’s breathlessly describing a moment of lust on “Drunk” or trying to dance away her demons on “Never Going Home.” Still, there’s a playfulness in how she handles these stories of heartbreak. “The Kill” is a churning spin on the push-pull dynamic of a doomed pairing where Rogers employs the classic songwriter trick of flipping the pronouns in the second chorus. And over the delightfully wobbly bassline of “On & On & On,” she delivers a forceful hook that’s guaranteed to be heard at the beach this summer.
Rogers is an accomplished singer, though not a belter in the traditional sense; while other singers might inflect the climax of a song with raw power, Rogers strains with emotion. The piano ballad “I Still Do” benefits from that delicacy, as does the acoustic track “All the Same,” which sounds like her take on the intimate, red-blooded folk of Zach Bryan. On the title track, she imitates the soaring vocals of country singers like Martina McBride and Carrie Underwood. If that honeyed, inspirational mode might be most readily associated with first dances at weddings, Rogers employs it as an act of desperation, laying out the absolute floor of what she wants in a relationship: “Take my money, wreck my Sundays/Love me till your next somebody/Oh, but promise me that when it’s time to leave/Don’t forget me.”
Even as her voice breaks towards the end, there’s a warmth to her newfound confidence. It’s a far cry from “Alaska,” the undergraduate demo track that took the words out of Pharrell’s mouth, where she recalled her first exposure to the Berlin club scene as a banjo-playing folk singer. That song juxtaposed her wide-eyed narration with electronic blips and bloops, like a baby deer stumbling into its first rave. Don’t Forget Me is, in many ways, its inverse: It inhabits parties and frantic nights out, yet the tracks carry the steady, guitar-backed propulsion of a road movie. Rogers, at last, sounds sure of her destination.
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