Are We Ready for the Early-2000s Radio Pop Comeback?
Soccer Mommy’s new album has that distinct turn-of-the-millennium sound. Meanwhile, an actual 2000s teen star returns. 20 years ago, both LPs would’ve been hits.
Photos by Michael Hickey/Getty & Mark Davis/Getty
In a recently published interview with The New York Times, actress and musician Mandy Moore said she knew, in 1999, she was in “distant fourth” place in the race for the new millennium’s crowned princess of pop. Ahead of her were, of course, Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera and Jessica Simpson. Moore was a double-threat actress with a good-girl persona.
If you were alive during this era of popular music, those names may spark the sonic memory of a mellow wash of post-hip-hop, post-grunge teen pop. If you’re alive right now, you may have recently heard a similar combination of glossy production and slippery synth from Soccer Mommy, aka the indie-rock band fronted by Nashville singer/songwriter Sophie Allison. Almost everyone writing about Allison’s new album color theory, out now on Loma Vista Recordings, has compared it to late-1990s/early-2000s radio pop (our critic also rightly likened it to ’90s alt-rock), including Allison herself: In a recent episode of Song Exploder, she compared swirling single “circle the drain” to the music from her childhood, including Sheryl Crow’s “Soak Up The Sun.”
The song has been heralded by music publications and fans everywhere (including Paste) as one of the catchiest—and best—songs of the year so far. But if “circle the drain,” a hypnotic hook fest, had been released, say, 20 years ago, around the time of Spears’ reign alongside boy band titans like *NSYNC and the Backstreet Boys, just as follow-ups like Michelle Branch and Natasha Bedingfield were taking over with their own twisty pop hits, it would’ve also been a radio smash. During this week in 2000, Faith Hill’s “Breathe”—a country song, but, still, in that same mellow pop vein—was sitting at number three on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. It would later come out on top as number one for that year. Two years later, in 2002, Avril Lavigne’s “Complicated” (also one of Allison’s cited inspirations) peaked at number two. In the late-90s and early 2000s, sad, curious women ruled the charts. It’s just the way it was.