Listen to Soccer Mommy’s Final Sometimes, Forever Single, “newdemo”
Photo by Sophie Hur
Soccer Mommy’s Sophie Allison has shared the fourth and final single from her forthcoming Sometimes, Forever, one of Paste’s most-anticipated releases of this month. The record pairs Allison with producer Daniel Lopatin of Oneohtrix Point Never, adding a newly atmospheric and epic sensibility to Soccer Mommy’s emotionally forthright, powerfully melodic indie rock.
“newdemo” is a gorgeous gut punch of a song, in which Allison levelly assesses the nightmarish time in which we’re alive. Singing with few pauses over watery acoustic guitar and looming synth, she surveys the iniquities of a world driven by “money and greed,” where the best-case scenario is successfully distracting ourselves from present injustice and future doom. She longs to tell us something good, but can’t deny the hard truth: “But what is a dream but a light in the darkness / A lie that you wish would come true?” In this no-bullshit context, the title of “newdemo” makes perfect sense—the song, like modern life, is what it is, and Allison refuses to pretty it up so as to make it more palatable.
“I didn’t want to make something super depressing without any sense of magic,” Allison explains in a statement. “We played around with the space to make the song feel vast, so ‘newdemo’ had a huge transformation in the studio. It’s one of my favorites off of the record.”
“newdemo” follows previous Sometimes, Forever singles “Shotgun,” “Unholy Affliction” and “Bones.” The record itself is Allison’s follow-up to 2020’s acclaimed color theory.
Soccer Mommy will support Sometimes, Forever on their extensive (and cleverly titled) Touring, Forever tour, which runs this summer and into the fall. The band recently performed on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, and will play a livestreaming set at New York City’s Governors Ball festival this Sunday. More info here.
Listen to “newdemo” (with a visualizer created by Lucy Benson) and revisit Soccer Mommy’s 2018 Paste Studio session below. You’ll find the band’s tour dates further down.