Soccer Mommy: 2024

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Soccer Mommy's Sophie Allison and I last spoke in February 2020 — before Covid closed down the globe and right before she released her second album, Colour Theory. The opportunity to pick up that conversation four years later, upon the release of Soccer Mommy's fourth album, Evergreen, was particularly meaningful.

Evergreen is an elegiac, introspective, and luminously beautiful album that is undoubtedly Allison's most personal to date. Song by song, Allison considers what it means to grapple with a life-altering loss of a parent, gazing at herself in a fractured mirror of grief. There's dark humor skittering throughout the album too, a goofy escape to a video game's farmland and a faux wife ("Abigail"), and the solace of good love (her partner is Soccer Mommy's guitarist, Julian Powell).

Sophie describes herself in the lyrics of "Driver" as a "five-foot-four engine waiting to move" — which speaks eloquently to this gifted songwriter's tenacity, no matter what life has thrown at her.  We touched on the difficult topic she addresses on Evergreen — her mother's passing — but spent more time on the things that Allison seemed more comfortable talking about; she prefers letting her lyrics speak for themselves. She finds power in Evergreen's stripped-back production, considers Slowdive a formative influence ("Souvlaki is one of my favorite albums ever"), and has a fake "Stardew Valley" farm (she grows melons and corn and has some pigs and rabbits).

Soccer Mommy played three songs from Evergreen — "M," "Lost," and "Driver" — and Sophie was joined by her band: Powell, bassist Nick Widener, keyboardist/guitarist Rodrigo Avendano, and drummer Rollum Haas.