On September 4th, 2025, Danish singer-songwriter Mags released her latest album, “Herified.” With her fiancé as her muse and surrounded by friends and family, the release party was not only a moment to celebrate three years of work, but to share a stripped down, nearly acoustic set of her beat-heavy work. A few days after “Herified” came out, we sat down with Mags to find out about the album release party, how these songs mark an important time in her life, and why – despite being out as queer for years – she still feels that coming out is part of her daily routine.
Listen to “Herified” while reading….
Rebecca: Happy album release! That’s really exciting. What was the actual release party like? Did it feel vulnerable to sing those songs in such an intimate setting?
Mags: These songs are very intimate, but actually they give me happy tears, at least most of them. “What movies are made of” feels so romantic. It’s a positive album for sure. Cathartic and positive. In the pre of “What movies are made of” I’m like, “I know where we started, but I don’t know where we’re going next. You see the New York apartment or are you going back to your ex?” It’s that vulnerable moment at the beginning of things, and it’s about my fiancé, who is like. right there!
She had obviously heard the song already, but it was was her first time being with me through an album cycle. It felt really special. Like, feeling super happy and gay and, yeah, you know, being able to have my family there to support me. It was very moving.
R: Has this album been part of a coming up journey for you?
M: That’s good question.
I was definitely out before the album came out, if you know what I mean, but I think that this is the most explicit I’ve ever been with my art. It’s hard to get more explicit.
Although everybody knows I’m out, there’s still that little voice saying, now this information is up for grabs for all the creeps on the internet. So that’s gross.
The biggest thing for me, actually, is that I’m happy in my life and in my relationship, and I want to be protective of that. But I have to say, as of these four days of the album being out, there has been an overwhelmingly positive experience.
R: There is something about being explicit about who you are that invites in people who will support and accept you. You’ve kind of cleared away the cobwebs.
M: Yeah, I’m so proud of myself. It’s very difficult to write an album. And my first album felt like such amalgamation of my youth. I started writing when I was so young. I didn’t know industry. I knew myself to the extent that you know yourself in your early 20s. This album was a very long process, but it also feels a lot more conclusive. I knew what I wanted to say, both in each song and on the album overall, and that was exciting.
R: “Herified” feels like an album that is about one person or one relationship, and one point of view. It’s an extremely hard thing to capture that kind of cohesion through eight songs.
M: I love that you’re saying that. I think about how Monet painted more than 200 paintings of the same thing. When I was writing the album, I read about that, and I was so intrigued by how he can be so committed to this one object in such a vast artistic expression. You’re looking at commitment. I think that is the same feeling of the album, which is: I’m committed to exploring this relationship through the lens of my queerness for all of these songs and in all of these different ways.
It’s interesting because I had the title of the album quite early on, but four or five months ago I ended up cutting two songs off the album because they didn’t feel representative of the exact narrative I was creating with the song list. In those two songs, there was still a bit of self-resentment present and I didn’t want that included in the world of the album. A big part of writing songs is cutting things out,
R: Do you miss those songs?
M: No. I’m so happy that they exist. I’m so happy I wrote them. But I think in the past couple of years, writing has been something that I’ve tried to refine. I write autobiographically, and it’s kind of like, if you write in your diary, some things you will share with a friend and some things you will never share. I put my hand on the hot stove too many times in some of my early work, and that felt too vulnerable.
There’s also the fact that three minutes – the length of a song – is not very long. So if you talk a lot about different experiences, like I did in my debut album, it doesn’t do the feeling justice. The way the world works now with these fast-paced TikToks, each song gets cut even shorter. That feels uncomfortable.
R: That’s interesting. Do you think, as an artist, that reductiveness as a result of social media plays into how you write?
M: I definitely got scared. That part hasn’t necessarily infiltrated the way that I write, but I have a bit of damage in terms of song structure. If you ask me to write a song, it will be less than three minutes and it will have a hook. When I started writing when I was 13, it would have seven verses, and maybe there would be one bridge. But if you want to play on the radio, which I do, there’s industry standard, right? It has been such a good tool for me as a person, and also as an artist, to have a confined structure to work within.
I think also it’s easier when I speak to my own emotion, because that can never be wrong. I own my own feelings. But when I start dipping my toe into the ocean of what it’s like being a queer woman, or what it’s like for the person that I might be speaking about, or being a femme- presenting woman at a bar, I’m more aware that it can be taken out of context. Then again, anything can.
R: When you write about someone else, what is your process for alerting them or playing a song for them? Where do you find the balance between speaking to your own experience, while also understanding that you may make someone upset or uncomfortable?
M: I used to have no balance at all. In my early 20s, it was all so unhinged and inappropriate. Now, I see the process of my self-involvement; if you’re over-sharing with your friends, at some point you realize, maybe I can start writing things down for myself. I don’t need to share this with anybody else. I’m proud of how I went through that process for this album. My fiancé is the muse of the album, and she’s an artist herself, so she’s very good at understanding that I’m not writing truth. I’m writing experience.
I played her the songs in advance During “Hospital Room” she sat in the mixing chair the day I recorded it. But sometimes my excitement can drown the emotion in the moment, you know? So it’s important to realize that there are feelings about it beyond my feelings.
“Apricot Jam” is about when we were in a long distance relationship, and I thought I was gonna die every time we were apart; full drama. It was a reinvigoration of feeling, like I was being abandoned. But now, because I’m so settled in my emotional self and in our relationship, I felt like I could explore those memories.
R: That is such a interesting way to put it. Once you’re in the safety of the stability, you can start to recall those feelings and not be triggered by them, but instead, objectively look at them.
M: Yeah, for better or worse.
R: Do you go back into those feelings when you’re singing the song?
M: Yes, I do. It’s intense. It takes over, in a way. I personally have never been able to both be a state where I perform and then also write. When I’m done performing and ready to write, I need to retract.
I’m so impressed that Taylor Swift has written a whole 12 song album while being on the biggest tour that has ever been done. That’s absolutely fantastically cool. But for me, there’s just too much feedback in performing. I’m sensitive to feedback in the moment, feedback from looking at people’s faces when they’re at a show. I don’t have a performer’s persona, so performing feels very raw. At the same time, I do like to perform; I never thought about giving my songs away as a songwriter.
R: So you are the songwriter, but in terms of the production of the album, what is your involvement in that?
M: I write most of the music, at least the ideas, myself. To begin with, I write poems, as not be confined certain rhymes or structures. The idea is, let’s get all the feelings into this poem. I play the guitar primarily. So then I’ll write half the song, like verse, pre, and chorus.
For this album, I really wanted to have one main collaborator instead of jumping around. When I started out with “Herified,” thought I only had space for one person in that process. Andreas Wilson Bendix and I spent an absurd amount of time together over the past three years, doing a lot of trial and error. Once we hit a creative vein, it was fast. We had, like, six months when we wrote the vast majority of the album.
I more recently decided to cut off two songs from the set list, and I also felt like I’ve changed over the past three years. You know, three years things happen.
Then I realized there was space for someone else.
I really wanted to work with a woman on the album. Sofie Daugaard is a great friend of mine and also an amazing artist and producer. I asked her, how do you feel using this album as your playground?
I had a song that I’d written and finished entirely – “What movies are made of,” and I wanted her to give it a go. And she was like, really? And she took that song to another level. It’s like a different song. I’m so proud of her. We also wrote “One thing straight” together, the final song on the album. What movies are made of. And she had, like, people come in and play the strings, and she arranged everything, wrote all the arrangement, did so many harmonies, so stunning. And then the final song on the album, it was the final song I wrote, yeah, and I wrote that with her.
R: “Herfieid” has uptime, it has downtime. I was going through the emotions while walking my dog. I had the full emotional experience.
M: A friend of mine said that he listened to the full album at the gym. And I was like, how did you work out to “Apricot Jam?” He said he was bench pressing.
R: Is there one song on this album that you feel is the standout single?
M: The title track, “Herified.” I think it encapsulates the album overall. I hope from the song itself people understand what the word means! I’m not a native speaker. Sometimes I have to cross-check with my partner, who is a native English speaker, and be like, did I stretch this too far?
R: Do you ever write songs in Danish?
M: Never. I always thought English was so much cooler than Danish. I grew up on the countryside and I just wanted to be cool. I remember playing with my dolls in English.
I also think it has been a good limitation for me, because I’ve had so many big feelings that having this parameter for how I could express them was helpful.
I’ve been fed a lot of classic love stories in English, whether it’s movies or music, and I think that’s where the language of it comes from for me. So I write everything in English but sometimes want to expand, and that’s when my own words enter the art. If there isn’t a word that entirely describes how I feel, or maybe I just don’t know the word, I’ll make up my own. That’s how I got to “Herified.”
Listen to Herified now!
All images by Kristine Sokolowski