Last spring, pop-punk polymath Maggie Lindemann says she was feeling activated. Fresh from the release of her eagerly anticipated and warmly received 2021 EP, PARANOIA, which has received more than 100 million streams to date, the 23-year-old felt the creative bug gnawing at her heels; eager to create – no matter what came of the creation process – she booked a week’s worth of studio time with her trusted team of co-writers and let the songs begin to flow, with the record taking shape over the course of the months that followed. Adrenaline, positive feedback from listeners of the EP, a newfound comfort with her collaborators, and “genuinely the best headspace I’ve ever found myself in” contributed to the 15-song album she’s now ready to put out for the world to hear. “I was really on myself about making sure every song was cohesive but had its own individual flair to it,” she says. “My only goal was to never half-ass anything I did.”

Building on the sharpened songwriting and singularly honed-in sounds she’d established on PARANOIA, Maggie spent that week in the studio formulating the foundation of her debut studio album, SUCKERPUNCH, and several months to follow to create a body of work that chronicles a journey of self-discovery and actualization. “It’s the journey from being upset to being angry to being hopeful – a hopefulness I want listeners to know exists for them, too,” she says. It’s also a rare narrative record in which the songs stand as firmly alone as they do in a sequenced order. “I was still in the PARANOIA headspace, and I didn’t want to leave it, but as we made these songs, you can hear me growing and going deeper than I ever have before,” Maggie notes. “Even if some of the melodies changed or production elements took new form, a lot of SUCKERPUNCH is as we originally wrote and intended it – songs that showcase the new version of who I’ve always wanted to be.”

On SUCKERPUNCH, Maggie folds in “hyperpop meets glam goth” sounds that she stumbled across on TikTok and in new (and old!) music she swaddled herself in during the pandemic, including Evanescence’s early ‘00s hits and up-and-coming Singaporean singer yeule’s incorporation of glitching into her work. Tracks like “self sabotage” and “i’m so lonely” opened her eyes to the possibility of what the evolution of her sound could be. The album name, she says, came to her soon after. “It’s an unexpected punch, a blow you didn’t see coming,” she says. “When I was making this, I had those blows in my own life; when I listened to the album back from start to finish, I realized the entire thing was a sucker punch – for myself, for my fans – and I knew it had to be the title.”

“Writing is my therapy, my way to get what I’m feeling and thinking and going through out so that I can try to move on from it,” she adds. “With this album, I finally knew: ‘I need to let go of this stuff, so I’m just going to write about it.’”

SUCKERPUNCH also takes all that devoted Maggie Lindemann fans know and love and supplements it with new levels of sophistication to her songwriting, storytelling, and singing. Early album cuts like “she knows it,” a throbbing anthem about same-sex attraction, delve into “entirely new territory for me,” she says. “I was shifting my focus. I was so used to writing about failed, toxic relationships, so when I went to do that on this album, I pushed myself to write about them in new ways, and to make sure I was writing authentically about where I am today, too – and where I want to be going.”

Signed only to a distribution deal, Maggie says being in the driver’s seat – with this record; with her hit clothing line, SWIXXZ; and with the YouTube channel she’s used to document her journey thus far – changed her outlook on making music forever, emboldening her to speak her mind, make the choices she needed to, and write and record the music she’s always wanted to. “I’m really able to do what I want and be creative and not have someone telling me that I’m not good enough or I need to change anything about myself,” she says. “If anyone knows what’s going to work with kids that are closer to your age who use apps that you scroll through for hours, I think I have a pretty good understanding of it. I have control over my own life now. I have control over my music and what I want to say, what I want to do, and how I want to do it.”