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The earliest iteration of Soccer Mommy emerged out of a bedroom in the summer of 2015, with a handful of lo-fi, home-recorded songs posted to Bandcamp. The songs were sparse and built around acoustic guitar, with a vividly confessional lyricism. Sophie Allison, the artist behind the moniker, was born in Zurich, Switzerland, but moved to Nashville as a toddler. She began playing guitar when she was a child, attended a high school for the performing arts, and started releasing the aforementioned home recordings. She left her home town to attend college, at N.Y.U., a venture that didn’t last long. After playing some shows, in 2017, Allison signed with Fat Possum records and dropped out of school, to begin a recording career in earnest.
Her latest project, “Evergreen,” is Soccer Mommy’s fourth album, following three critically acclaimed releases that have traversed a wide range of sonic style and production techniques. On her past two albums, “Color Theory,” from 2020, and “Sometimes Forever,” from 2022, Allison has shown an interest in increasing her volume and layering sounds to push her compositions into new territory. For “Sometimes Forever,” she worked with Daniel Lopatin, the electronic-music producer and arranger better known by his stage name, Oneohtrix Point Never. Their collaboration led to some beautifully harrowing songs that delved into shoegaze and experimental noise, among them, “Darkness Forever,” which teems with quiet spaces filled at intervals by weighty bass lines and heavy drags of electric guitar.
“Evergreen,” for Allison, is something of a return to form. Though it sounds cleaner and richer than her early bedroom recordings, and not without moments of high-volume intensity, the album is largely anchored by acoustic guitar. As on all of Soccer Mommy’s records, the other anchoring point is Allison’s songwriting, which is more granular and interior than traditional confessional fare. Her excavations of the self often come in tones of surprise: surprise at having made it this far, surprise at the velocity of her feelings, surprise that there is still more to be felt after all this time. Where some confessional writing might come steeped in certainty, its authors sure that they’re experts on themselves, Allison’s writing is appealing for its bouts of bewilderment: in the “Evergreen” song “Salt in Wound,” she muses on the lingering effects of ache, and the inability to escape it, as a shock to the body—“Pretty words just turn me blue.”
The opening song, “Lost,” introduces the album’s central preoccupation: navigating life after life-altering loss. Acoustic guitar strumming flows into a swell of strings as Allison sings, “I’ve got her name / I’ve got her face and all these things / but I don’t know what’s in her dreams / it’s lost to me.” (The bio for the album mentions that Allison suffered a personal loss; it offers no elaboration, but on “Color Theory” she wrote with clarity and candor about her mother suffering from cancer, using colors to represent shifting physical and emotional states, as in the song “Yellow Is the Color of Her Eyes,” on which she sings “so blue / Can’t erase the hue” and “Loving you isn’t enough / You’ll still be deep in the ground when it’s done.”) On “Lost,” the chorus opens with the line “Lost in a way that don’t make sense,” and by the second time it hits it gives the visceral feeling of someone reaching for something that was solid once and watching it turn to liquid in their hands. The album is brilliantly sequenced, and the same sentiment becomes even more vivid in the next song, “M,” which—though more sonically upbeat, with a steady drum keeping time underneath the guitar—begins with the lines “I feel you / Even though you’re gone / And I don’t mind talking to empty halls.”
On some albums, the songs feel like distinct chapters in a book; Allison excels at writing songs that flow one into the next as if telling a continuous story. She doesn’t just splash you with her feelings; she adds narrative textures that prove to be transportative. In “Some Sunny Day,” she’s alone in a room looking at the ceiling, and a shadow dances across in “the shape of an angel,” an unsatisfying trick of light. There’s a wonderful arc in the middle of the album involving mentions of hair. In “Changes,” a description of Allison’s mother’s locks “colored by her age” segues into an image of a painted-over house. The next song, “Abigail”—perhaps the least melancholy on the record, opening with a rapid shot of drums and vivid electric keys—is an ode to a character in a video game who captivates with her purple hair. The song is a reminder of Allison’s penchant for pleasure and play.
Indeed, it would undercut this album, I think, to refer to it as plainly sad. On its face, “Evergreen” is a project bearing an immense weight, but sadness comes alive and transforms in the course of these songs. On “Dreaming of Falling,” for me the album’s highlight, an electric guitar draws out notes to create an atmosphere of exhaustion. Allison sings, “Stuck on a bridge / In a traffic jam / Foot on the brake / With no kind of plan.” In a few short lines she translates a mundane frustration into a metaphorical nowhere, capturing the dilemma of trying to move from where you are to where you want to be without the tools to do it. The song’s images of immobility form one of the album’s clearest articulations of the experience of grief. “Between a wall and a hole / Where the black don’t end / And sometimes it feels like I am / Dreaming of falling when I’m half awake.”
It made me think of the feeling I get, during long-distance runs, where I reach what some would call a runner’s high. To me, it feels like something else—a lack of awareness about anything other than the fact that I am moving forward and that I cannot or should not stop. Physically, mentally, I achieve a kind of emptiness: nothing exists except the next stretch of ground. But the moment I stop, everything rushes back, the world becomes loud again, my body becomes mortal and inevitably rich with aches, and I have to sit down. Allison’s writing on “Evergreen” seems to translate that specific feeling of overwhelm and to prolong it. You try to catch your breath, but it is all too much to bear. You have to get up eventually, because otherwise the world will move on without you, which in that moment seems unacceptable. But for a moment the stillness and reliability of the ground makes sense. ♦
Sourse: newyorker.com
