Soccer Mommy

Sophie Allison has always written candidly about her life, making Soccer Mommy one of indie rock’s most interesting and beloved artists of the last decade. Allison has used Soccer Mommy’s songs as a vehicle to sort through the thoughts and encounters that inevitably come with the reality of growing up. After all, Soccer Mommy began as a bedroom-to-Bandcamp exercise with teenage Allison posting her plaintive songs as demos. Over the years, though, she has often enhanced that sound, using the endless production possibilities, newly at her fingertips, to outstrip singer-songwriter stereotypes. The records would start with songwriting’s kernels of truth, and she would then imagine all the unexpected shapes they could take. Every Soccer Mommy record has felt like a surprise.

On Soccer Mommy’s fourth album, the tender but resolute Evergreen, Allison is again writing about her life. But that life’s different these days: Since making her previous album, 2022’s Sometimes, Forever, Allison experienced a profound and also very personal loss. New songs emerged from that change, unflinching and sometimes even funny reflections on what she was feeling. (Speaking of funny, this is a Soccer Mommy album, so there’s an ode to Allison’s purple-haired wife in the game Stardew Valley, too.) These songs were, once again, Allison’s way to sort through life, to ground herself. She wanted them to sound that way, too, to feel as true to the demos—raw and relatable, unvarnished and honest—as possible. The songwriting would again lead where the production would follow. Nothing overindulgent, everything real.

Evergreen is the absorbing result, an 11-track seesaw of articulate feeling that suggests Allison is driving you through the streets of her native Nashville, the Tennessee sun bright as she plays you a tape of songs she cut to document those very dark days. Eschewing the experimental production of Sometimes, Forever, Evergreen mirrors that earlier self-made work, but recasts it with a sense of cinematic scale. There’s the beautiful acoustic billow of opener “Lost,” a tormented thesis that still manages to break through the most oppressive clouds. There’s the haze and sway of “Some Sunny Day,” where the promise of reunion is the only palliative for the vertigo of loss. And above the muted jangle of “Dreaming of Falling,” she summons momentary glimpses of madness—waking terrors, sunlight burning the skin, everyday experiences that begin to frame the black hole of forever. “Half of my life is behind me,” she sings, chords wafting like low clouds, “and the other has changed somehow.”

Allison began writing Evergreen without really knowing it. At home between sessions for Sometimes, Forever, she penned “Changes,” an acoustic ballad about what we lose with time, about how even our most familiar and important lodestars will warp, fade, disappear. She set it aside, knowing little about its fate other than it didn’t need the complex electronic textures of what she was then making. But as those sessions ended and she began to write her way through loss, “Changes” seemed like the skeleton key, its mantra of inescapable impermanence putting the rest of the songs into context. Allison most often wrote quickly, verses and choruses piling up after months of contemplating all that had gone missing. A frank glimpse into nostalgia and the troubles it can bring, “Thinking of You” came together in 10 minutes. “How long is too long to be stuck in a memory?” she asks. “Lost,” like many of the songs that follow, didn’t take much more. The goal was always to make snapshots of a moment’s feelings, to portray the sadness or beauty, survival or hope that bobs there in the wake of loss.

This became the working directive for capturing Evergreen, too—serving those moments, framing them without obfuscating the emotional burdens or gifts that anchored them, to let the lyrics and moods speak for themselves. Allison rendezvoused in Atlanta with producer Ben H. Allen III (Deerhunter, Animal Collective, Youth Lagoon, Belle and Sebastian) and told him she wanted to elide synthesizers and digital flourishes this time, favoring acoustic guitars, rich drums, and interweaving flutes. They built basic tracks for half the album as a pair in Allen’s Maze Studios before ushering in her touring band to add more. There were real flutes and real strings, just as Allison had imagined. As the layers and ideas mounted, Allen and Allison focused on peeling them back, on leaving subtle touches that never crowded the sentiments. The songs retain the spirit of the demos, candid and direct.

Evergreen animates Allison’s reckonings with loss through sounds that can conjure a sad-eyed daydream or an ecstatic weekend escape. Allison sings to shadows and ghosts during “M,” the band shuffling and swaying as she communes with open air. She recognizes that staying so devoted to something that’s gone could be a problem, but for right now, it’s the best she’s got. The delightfully crunchy “Driver” is a testament to Allison’s spaciness and indecision; it’s a cheeky song about someone who is willing to deal with those flaws, to love you in spite of them. The Janus-faced “Salt in Wound” functions as the record’s thematic and musical nexus—graceful but gnarled as it balances dual needs to be honest about what hurts and press on, anyway. Indeed, despite Allison’s aim to render instants in full, repeated phrases and concepts bubble up throughout Evergreen, the songs questioning and answering one another in the tussles of past becoming present becoming future.

Allison assembled Evergreen as she crept into her late 20s, that tenuous time where the travails of adulthood suddenly look much closer than the playground of childhood. And during the three-year span since finishing Sometimes, Forever and beginning Evergreen, Allison learned loss is not a monolith. Some days are brutal and others are beautiful, as you take what you have gained from someone who is no longer here and try to carry it ahead, a talisman for whatever may come. “She cannot fade/She is so evergreen,” Allison sings in the devastating but strangely affirming title finale, strings sighing beneath the brush of her acoustic guitar. It feels like a lucid note to self. And that, after all, is where these songs started—Allison, writing songs for herself that documented what it was she was going through, just as she’s always done.