For the Danish musician Mags, 2025 is gearing up to be the year of liberation, sex and sadness.

“This is my first album where I’m actually going to marry a woman that I’m engaged to and it feels radically honest to have a whole album about sapphic love,” Mags says, sitting behind a large blue painting in a Copenhagen café one chilly morning in August, as she readies her sophomore album “Herified,” out Friday.

The album has been in the works for three years, undergoing numerous edits and cuts that have reflected Mags’ journey to accepting her queerness. The final product is a pop, indie-rock sound with eight catchy tracks. She wrote 80 songs for the album and in the final cull, she cut out two tracks from the album that had an undertone of resentment. This album, she clarifies, is about joy.

“I’m happy and gay, there’s nothing super tragic here,” Mags says.

She released the album’s title track “Herified” in October 2024 with an upbeat tempo that borrows elements from her musical hero Robyn. “I’m herified, I like the way you move and talk s–t, I can’t figure you out,” she sings on the track.

“The song and album name is about taking something passive and making it active, such as the noun ‘her,’” Mags says. “This album represents being active and coming out, coming together and [building a] community.”

Her other tracks include the tongue-in-cheek “Shakespeare Could Never,” which plays on the ridiculousness of love stories, where couples buy cats together and get married within two days of knowing each other; “I’m Not Crying Wolf” details Mags’ coming to terms with her sexuality, and “Blue,” which is about her asking her fiancé what her favorite color is and partly a nod to the 2013 queer coming-of-age film “Blue Is the Warmest Color.”

Mags is a romantic at heart and admits to wearing her heart on her sleeve.

“I don’t know where it comes from because my parents are divorced. Maybe it’s just childhood trauma,” she jokes. “I’ve been feeling this way since I was 10 and I’ve grown up with such strong female representation around me, from my grandmother, my mother and sister.”

Surrounding herself by strong women extended to the making of the album. She worked with the female producer Sofie Daugaard, otherwise known as Dopha, the queer photographer Kristine Sokolowski shot the cover art where Mags is posing with another queer woman and the writer who wrote her press materials is a queer woman.

It was a half-conscious decision. “When I look around me, the most talented people I know are all queer women and there’s so much talent in the queer community,” Mags says.

“Herified” is a metamorphosis moment for the 30-year-old musician.

“I’m much more proud of and excited of the woman I am at 30 than the woman I was at 20. I love the woman I was in my 20s and I want to give her such a big hug. If she could have heard this album, I think she would have lost her s–t because I never thought that I could put out this kind of album,” she says.

Growing up in a small Danish town, Mags turned to music at the age of seven, where every Friday she would watch a television show that breaks down the top 10 songs. She received a guitar for her 12th birthday, which was around the same time she discovered Robyn’s music.

“I even took drumming lessons. What says gay more than drumming lessons?” she says laughing.

Mags spent high school in Costa Rica and went down a musical path, but found the experience to be too rigid. “I don’t know how to read musical notes and I was so bad at the technical aspects of it that I took an academic route,” she recalls.

She moved back to Denmark in 2017 to study political science at university and within a month, she received record deals from Universal Music, Warner Music and Sony Music. She signed with Warner Music for five years and then switched to work with Sony Music, where she has made a distribution deal with the music label to be able to own more of her music like artists such as Raye and Caroline Polachek.

Mags completed her undergraduate studies in late 2019 and released her eponymous album in 2020.

Music remains the priority for her and connecting with people. At the launch party of “Herified,” she’s already made sure to invite all the young queer women who have been messaging her on Instagram.

“It must be really cool to be 11 years old nowadays,” she says. “It’s different from when I was that age.”