Soccer Mommy: More Than Words

Across four albums and 42 songs, Sophie Allison—the 27-year-old singer-songwriter who traipses through various shapes of rock ‘n’ roll as Soccer Mommy—has already lived enough lives to fill out an entire multi-decade discography. It’s been six years since her debut LP, Clean, enraptured the hearts of many with its stripped-down, bedroom rock infatuations and plainspoken familiarities. Songs like “Your Dog” and “Cool” were conversational and anything but nostalgic, as Allison’s penmanship rested on the laurels of a present-bound messiness. “I want to make you mine and drag you like a kite,” she sang, crushingly, in 2018, pulling as much influence from Sheryl Crow and Taylor Swift as Pavement and Slowdive, enacting a proper collision of rough-around-the-edges, strummy melodies garnished by some of the knottiest and most promising hooks of this millennium. She’s not the college girl playing barely-filled Long Island rooms as a bottom-of-the-bill performer anymore.

Instead, over the last half-decade, Allison has built a bulletproof catalog on her own whim, dropping tangled, clear-eyed albums every other year and, in the case of a record like color theory, unquestionably turning herself into one of the most bankable working musicians in Nashville with floppy disk samples and drum machines setting her darkened truths of ill-health and courage ablaze. Her last full-length, 2022’s Sometimes, Forever was an Oneohtrix Point Never-aided coil of synths, gauzy guitars and experimental production. There, she measured the gaps between longing and intimacy, parsing grief out of joy and grappling with her bedroom roots becoming a newfound and, at times, overwhelming level of critical success. With a string of darling LPs to her name and a “cult following” of a million monthly listeners on Spotify, Soccer Mommy holds court at the podium of that so-called “sad girl indie” subset, serving as one of Avril Lavigne’s greatest modern acolytes yet obliterating all precedents set by the “Complicated” songwriter; Allison’s work is anchored by snapshots rather than years squeezed into three- or four-minute bursts.

When the first notes of acoustic guitar on her new album, Evergreen, ring in on “Lost,” I’m immediately flung backwards into songs like “Last Girl” and “Skin” instead of “circle the drain” or “Shotgun.” It’s a refreshingly bare sound glued into place by symphonic textures and swirling, airy magic. “I’m constantly trying to push myself to do different stuff,” Allison says. “[Evergreen] felt like the ultimate ‘being experimental’ album, stripping it back. The songs just really called for it.” Writing the Evergreen songs didn’t remind her, necessarily, of making Clean, but of writing songs in her bedroom and uploading them online without any grand vision. “I just wanted them to feel really raw and honest at the core,” she admits. “That’s what I was focused on with this album, too. The songs [on Evergreen] were just so special to me and very particular and lyrical. I wanted that to shine through more than anything else, and I wanted it to reflect the feeling that it gave me.” If Allison had to compartmentalize Evergreen into an image, she’d say that the album looks like a car, windows down, driving through a Tennessee fall and she’s in the driver’s seat, drinking in all of the air and the grief.

Meeting Allison at the crossroads of Evergreen is a gift. As the 11 songs unfold, it’s like watching her combine where Soccer Mommy is now with where Soccer Mommy was in 2018. The bedroom mentality never went away, but the recording spaces got denser. The rooms got bigger, but the life being sung about remains the same size. The phrase “coming of age” follows Allison everywhere, as her music is so often this meticulously crafted and generous tempest of growth and fallibility. At just 25 years old, she was singing the “I miss feeling like a person” line from “Still” in venues packed wall-to-wall with her peers, and they all listened, following her intuition, admissions and imperfections like a green light. “I find myself writing songs that I wouldn’t have written years ago, because I wouldn’t have been able to imagine myself making a song like ‘circle the drain,’ to be honest,” Allison says. “When I was just writing songs and putting them on Bandcamp, I wouldn’t have been doing anything like that, because I didn’t really understand that I could go make this pop song that I was envisioning. Now, I have that vision and I know it’s a reality. That’s something I can do.”

Allison carried that vision into the making of Evergreen, too, imagining instrumentation that sounds like a breath of fresh air and perfect weather. And if that isn’t the definition of “pop music,” then what is? Even at its gloomiest, Soccer Mommy’s new era is full of sunshine. “I wanted to evoke that feeling for myself and evoke that visual kind of beauty,” Allison explains. “I had a lot of ideas about the flutes and the strings and approaching things in a different way, to make it a different sonic landscape that spoke truly to the songs.” She wanted Evergreen’s final product to sound like the demo tapes but bigger. “I didn’t want to lose that intimacy, even just with the vocals,” she adds. “I wanted it to feel close and soft.”

Of course, Evergreen isn’t totally stripped back. The beautiful strings that fill out “Lost,” provided by Raven Bush, turn into sugary, nurturing swirls of atmosphere on “Changes” before swelling into a full-band collage of the last three albums on “Abigail” and “Driver” without tugging on any one particular sound. Thanks to her work with producer Ben Allen—whom Allison met through her label, Loma Vista—she was able to execute a medley of strings and woodwinds that she’d demoed with patches on her keyboard. “We had a pre-production period too where me and Ben really took four or five songs and started doing work on them, just to see what happened and figure out a lot of sounds,” she notes. “That gave us a lot of clarity—and I think having that time to really just mess around and know that we can change anything when we come back and actually record, but also we can get these sonic ideas and see how the songs need to sit a little bit, that was really helpful.”

And even the textures that sound full and explosive weren’t done in the typical Soccer Mommy, band-in-a-room fashion. “There were some exceptions,” Allison admits, “but [it was mostly] doing drum and bass—or rhythm guitar, drum and bass—and then building those live takes around stuff that we had already pre-recorded and blending the two ideals.” It all sounds confident and symphonic, lush even. Evergreen is a departure in a discography of departures; no two Soccer Mommy albums truly sound alike, nor should anyone want them to, but every Soccer Mommy album sounds exactly like the woman who made it—because Sophie Allison is at her best when she strikes the balance she’s been perfecting since color theory: remaining tethered to the iterations of herself that have come and gone without sacrificing the weirdness of her own current sonic interests.

It’s why Allison didn’t double down on making a second electronic album in a row, or why she is more interested in sealing imperfections in amber despite having access to the best production an indie rock budget can buy: Soccer Mommy is a project wed to the labors of keeping it real and keeping it strange. You can hear that in Allen’s arrangements on a song like “Anchor,” which stretch and move through the chords without hitting perfect notes. “Making this record, we were very particular about not wanting to let anything onto the songs or the track that was not really serving a purpose or doing something important—not clouding it up with a bunch of layers,” Allison says. “It was a less is more approach, even though there’s still a good amount of stuff going on at any given time.”

Allison wrote Clean, color theory and Sometimes, Forever all relatively close to each other, but the songs on Evergreen sat for a minute while she focused her efforts on doing press and touring Sometimes, Forever after its June 2022 release. “When you’re putting out an album and doing press and interviews, it’s always the hardest part for me, to write during that time period—just because my focus gets shifted,” she says. “Trying to write something new and fresh and get new ideas, and also having to think a lot about what you just made, is very hard.” A month before Sometimes, Forever hit DSPs, Allison wrote the first song that would end up on Evergreen: “M,” a unique addition to the tracklist, as it’s one of the few times that a years-old song made its way onto one of her albums—not since the Clean days, at least.

“I’ve never thrown something like that [on a record],” Allison adds. “It was just this song that I wrote and it didn’t fit with Sometimes, Forever, so I kind of just abandoned it in a way where I just set it aside and thought, ‘I really like that song, I just don’t know if that’s a song I’ll put out. It might be something that I like and just sits, it doesn’t necessarily have to be shown to the world.’” Then, while writing the rest of Evergreen, Allison found “M” on her Dropbox account and could still feel its insight long after first writing it, an energy stored in those splendid guitar moves. Some of Evergreen was written quickly, like “Lost” and “Thinking of You,” calling to mind how Allison wrote “royal screw up” in a matter of hours more than four years ago. “It feels so good when something comes out that quickly,” she says. “You don’t have to work so hard for it. It might seem strange, but I think that you still could get really broad views of everything when you’re writing like that, just straight off the top of your head.” She likens that expedited process to being “pissed off about something and you’re venting to a friend and you could just keep going forever.” “It starts to feel like that,” she contends. “It just keeps inspiring me. It always feels particularly magical when it can just come out like that.”

On Clean and color theory, Allison worked with producer Gabe Wax before teaming up with Oneohtrix Point Never’s Daniel Lopatin on Sometimes, Forever. Lopatin’s complementary approach, in which he composed heady arrangements to best flatter Allison’s big-time, deeply wounding lyricism, felt like a machine Soccer Mommy was meant to operate out of. Even in Evergreen’s wide-eyed, controlled bombast, she remains there. In fact, Allison carries with her pieces of guidance from every producer she’s worked with, lessons, tricks and techniques that are a part of her vocabulary forever. “You learn so much from them and then you bring it into the albums, even if you’re doing something different you can bring in certain ideas that you have for how you want your record to sound and how you want to get there,” she says. “When you try exciting things on every record, sometimes you find something that you’re like, ‘This is my thing. I love this so much. Even with Sometimes, Forever, on ‘Still,’ we did some vocal loop stuff with my Microcosm pedal that ended up being super pretty and super whimsical and beautiful. That was something that I really wanted to try to do again on this record. It was something that just felt so true to something that I loved and so interesting but not distracting. It kept everything really in the same zone that I wanted it to be in.”

Rather than make another record at the Sound Emporium in Nashville, Allison and her bandmates decamped to Maze Studios in Atlanta to bring Evergreen to life, likening the experience to being on a work trip where “all you’re there to do is work and get that kind of stuff done and you’re not distracted by trying to hang out with friends or going home and living your normal life.” “I also kind of go crazy when I do that, but I still prefer it,” she declares. “I think it’s better, it’s more productive.” Allison prefers not to work in Tennessee—not because her creative brain can wander through new fascinations, but because any proximity to her personal life makes locking in all the more difficult. It’s hard to see the fringes when you’re so consumed by the art you’re constructing. “The nature of making [Evergreen] was very productive and very focused. The studio was my life for that time period. There’s not really much else I’m doing,” she affirms. “Maybe I’ll get dinner with someone I know, or something like that, but it’s so nice to be there just to work. That might sound strange, but it’s really, really nice to be there just to work. It makes me feel focused and very in it. I think, at home, it’s easy for it to feel chaotic and, especially if you’ve got people from out of town and they’re working with you, you’re hosting and you’re trying to do fun stuff every night. It’s just not worth it. It’s so much better when you’re logged out from your real life.”

When Allison and I last spoke, during the Sometimes, Forever press cycle, she mentioned something to me about how Nashville makes sense as a home base for her because her people are there. It’s a place that allows her to remain close with nature without abandoning the fruits of what’s familiar to her. That conversation becomes even more crystallized on Evergreen—from the title all the way through how Allison is reckoning with a kind of grief that lingers in the spaces we know best. The idea of home, musically and emotionally, becomes even more complex with every Soccer Mommy release, as it remains a place of importance as well as a place that beckons escape. “But I’ve always felt that way, to be honest,” Allison admits. “I always loved having this anchor and realizing that it’s such a part of me, where I grew up.” Moving to New York City to attend NYU opened her eyes to who she was and not who she wanted to be.

“It made me feel at peace and made me feel calm about what things I valued,” Allison continues. “That came out especially when I started traveling for work and being all over the world. It still feels like such an important space for me, because it holds all these memories and holds all of these things that I want. I think that’s very important, especially with grief. It can be very painful and it can be very difficult to not want to avoid it. I think, a lot of times, it feels easier to just want to get away. But I think it’s also really important to think about the fact that, with that, it also holds all of the beauty that was still there and can be really beautiful, too, rather than just something that’s painful. It doesn’t have to be only that, it can be something that’s really special and happy and magical.”

Loss is a galvanizing force behind Evergreen, but what sticks out to me on every re-listen is how these 11 songs focus on what comes after that: reflection, reckoning, compromise, metamorphosis. Allison is a private person who opts to not talk about the whys and hows of what she sings about. The profound tragedies she’s experienced exist in the songs on her own terms and in her own parlance. “I feel you even though you’re gone, and I don’t mind talking to hollow walls” is like a siren pointing at an absence. Missing another person, like courage, is not a switch you can turn on and off. We see our loved ones in strangers’ faces on the street and hear them in all of our favorite songs. We can feel them in our favorite videogames, too. “Abigail” is about Allison’s wife in Stardew Valley, yet a line like “I will be waiting at your door for you to let me in” stretches itself out far wider than that, circling back to her real-life, eight-year relationship with her longtime partner. On Evergreen, there is no more honeymoon phase for Soccer Mommy. Perhaps her previous records hoped there’d be.

Art remains an opportune vessel for grief, and writing songs has helped Allison come to peace with herself and provide clarity mid-phrase. “I think there’s a lot of wavering on [Evergreen], between drowning a little bit and being like, ‘There’s no light ever again’—being a little bit melodramatic—and also, at other times, seeing the light and letting it be warm and not just making it into something that is the end-all of your life,” she says. “And I think that’s something I always thought I would feel—and, at times, I do—but it’s important to also cherish those moments. Like in ‘Thinking of You,’ things that are reminding you of a person or reminding you of something that you miss are beautiful for doing that. It’s really special to have those things, compared to wanting to just erase them and not have them. It’s important to accept them and feel joy from things that make you remember, rather than only feel sadness.”

Trauma, isolation and mortality have never been absent from Soccer Mommy’s albums, either, but I appreciate how those ideas are constantly being revised to better suit the person Allison is always evolving into. We rightfully praise artists for stepping out of their comfort zone so obviously when they make a record that sounds nothing like what they’d made prior, but I’d wager that there’s praise to be given to someone for asking the same question they’ve posed before. Maybe our understanding of what the answer might be is what’s different. Maybe the point of growth is to not abandon everything you’ve ever done. Maybe our perspectives just need to be colored into new shades. Even from the demoing stage, Allison wanted Evergreen to be a document of exactly who she is at her core, even if the truth of that looks different than it did on Clean or Sometimes, Forever. “It feels connected to a lot of my other stuff. ‘M’ for example feels like that, even just adding the outro on the end of ‘yellow is the color of her eyes’ and this flipped, connected feeling between songs like that, even if they have different perspectives now, because it’s coming from the same piece of me,” she remarks.

When she was making Evergreen, soundscapes quickly became tools as holistic as the lyrics themselves. The bowing of the strings too often works as a trigger of memory that you can’t—nor want to—escape; the guitars collapse into each other, revealing only Allison’s vocal. “I think that’s always really important to me, especially when you’re writing something that’s very emotional, to make sure that it’s giving all of that,” she says. “Especially on songs like [‘Lost’ and ‘M’]. I wanted this album to immediately evoke a feeling, regardless of whether you heard what the song was saying or not. I wanted it to get there. With ‘M,’ just writing that outro part, I wanted there to be this beautiful moment to lead it out that didn’t even necessarily have to have words and was just purely following the feeling of these chord progressions. I really wanted [Evergreen] to feel huge and feel very powerful.”

While a line like “Pull back my skin, see what remains” in “Thinking of You” reminds me of the “I think your heart could use a tourniquet” line in “Bones,” Allison isn’t looking for that one standout lyric to build a story around. It’s all much more organic. “I think if I get really excited about one little lyrical idea, I go over the top and I try to make it stand out more, repeat it, and do all this stuff,” she says. “I think it’s better if something can just be a quick, passing thing that can be somebody’s favorite lyric.” Still, that “Thinking of You” line is one of her favorites on Evergreen, an image that came naturally when she was thinking about someone, or something, becoming so much more than “an action.” Such an idea speaks to the album’s immenseness lingering even in the most barren of rock textures. Just like Clean, color theory and Sometimes, Forever, Sophie Allison wrote her fourth album alone, but it’s as much a part of our language now as it is hers, growing pains and all—a folk record for the true romantics, and a delightful, challenging counterpoint to life’s ugliest pathways. “It becomes something that’s just filling up the entire inside of you,” Allison offers. “It’s all you have, really.”

Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Northeast Ohio.