Momma: 2025

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Momma co-founders and collaborators Allegra Weingarten and Etta Friedman (both on vocals and guitar) have been making music together since high school. In a sense, the friends’ discography could be considered a collaborative diary — a collective journal documenting the experiences and emotions that defined their most formative years. That would make Welcome to My Blue Sky, the Brooklyn band’s fourth album, the latest installment: a 12-track time capsule penned during the songwriters’ summer of what they've called "parallel chaos," while on a whirlwind tour around the country in 2022.

Whereas a diary is private by nature, Welcome to My Blue Sky is a bold public record of very human feelings and follies – of fantasies, frustrations, infidelities and farewells. And the album is not a note to self but a set of confessions scribed for a specific audience — a work that Momma described in our conversation as “what we need to write about; we need to chronicle this time in our lives.”

Named after a particularly poetic billboard the band spotted on tour (which, they soon discovered, was actually an ad for an oil company), Welcome to My Blue Sky is out now via Polyvinyl. Ahead of the release, Allegra and Etta, along with drummer Preston Fulks and their bassist Aron Kobayashi Ritch, who also produced the album, swung by Studio A to play a few songs from the record: “Ohio All The Time”; “I Want You (Fever)”; and “Rodeo.”

Weingarten, Friedman, and Ritch also sat down for an interview, where they discussed entering Momma’s new era, writing from their exes’ perspectives and joining the surprisingly large league of bands penning musical odes to Ohio.

[Recorded: 1/17/2025; Engineered by Jim O'Hara with Matthew Ellersick, James Higgins, and Sophia Derrig-Palumbo; produced by Meghan Suma. Videographers: Therese Burgo, Anna Fahy, Louisa Schramm, Cate Dalton and Gina Slavin.]