NEED TO KNOW
Maggie Lindemann went through a lot while making her new album.
The alt-pop artist’s second full-length album, I Feel Everything, was released on Friday, Oct. 17 after more than a year in the works — the longest she’s ever spent on a single project.
“I kept talking to my family and my friends about the situations I was in, and I kept saying, ‘Dude, I just feel everything. I’m feeling so much,'” Lindemann, 27, tells PEOPLE of its title. “I was feeling a lot of highs, lows, confusion, sadness, happiness, pain, all of it. I was literally feeling everything.”
Courtesy of Maggie Lindemann
Lindemann started writing I Feel Everything in March 2024, the same month her Headsplit EP was released. At the time, she was in a relationship with NBA player Jordan Clarkson and ready to expand her alternative sound to include more electronic and pop elements heard on new tracks like “One of the Ones,” the album’s explosive lead single. “I’m constantly trying to evolve,” she says.
As an independent artist, Lindemann gets to call the shots and doesn’t feel “restricted” by any big-time record label executives. The album was nearly done at the top of the year, but then she and Clarkson, 33, split. So, she extended her time in the studio. “Obviously, I had some stuff to say,” she notes.
Courtesy of Maggie Lindemann
“If you hear the songs that came before the breakup versus after, I knew it was coming. I knew it was something that I needed to do,” explains Lindemann, who started dating Clarkson in 2022. “And then the after is almost like a weight lifted off my shoulders.”
The extra studio time resulted in songs like “Evil,” featuring lyrics about a partner who often plays the “victim” in a relationship. “Thought I saw love in your eyes / Turns out it was mine,” she sings.
“If I love you, I don’t want to see the bad in you. I am always going to see the good in you. Even if you literally do me in the worst way, I’m still going to somehow see the good in you,” says Lindemann. “With that song, I finally snapped a little bit.”
Creating “Evil” allowed Lindemann to feel the anger she’d been suppressing. “It’s okay to be mad and not excuse someone’s behavior,” she urges.
Such experiences inspired Lindemann’s decision to pose while laying on a bed of nails for the I Feel Everything cover artwork. “I am putting myself on this bed of nails to feel pain, to be stuck, when I could literally just stand up and walk away,” she says. “There’s so many different meanings behind the cover, but mainly, beauty is pain and loving someone is pain.”
And for anyone wondering, yes, the photoshoot was physically painful. “Everyone thinks that it didn’t hurt because there’s a trick to a bed of nails. If all the nails are evenly distributed and all the same height, then if you evenly distribute your body weight on it, it’s not supposed to hurt,” she explains. “But we made this bed of nails ourselves.”
Courtesy of Maggie Lindemann
“If you look at the picture, you can see that the nails are not evenly on the board. So it very much did hurt,” continues Lindemann. “I was super bruised on my whole side.”
As its title suggests, I Feel Everything encompasses way more than just the darker periods of her life while creating the project. Songs like “One of the Ones” and “Lost Cause” feature high-energy dance beats ready for nightclubs, while “Let Me Burn” with The Warning and “2022” with Julia Wolf mark fun collaborations reminiscent of early-2000s alt-pop from Avril Lavigne and Evanescence.
“It was fun to have fun. I feel like I’ve been so depressed and angsty for a while and I was like, ‘Oh my God, I just want to have fun,'” says Lindemann, who insists she’s “not a depressed person in real life.”
“I feel like that’s a meme with alternative girls,” quips the performer. “Everyone thinks that we’re always going to be like, ‘Yeah, I’m super dark, and I like death and going to the cemetery and stuff like that.’ And then most of us, when you talk to us, we’re really bubbly and actually really happy usually.”
