The second becoming of Soccer Mommy

But there’s a second, slower coming of age too. In this later-in-adolescence period, transitions become less about the angsty come up than the subtle, sometimes somber shift into adulthood. And on her new record Evergreen, that second in-between is where Soccer Mommy finds herself.

Sitting in her hotel room in London when we talk, Allison has had quite the week. Despite having been sick with the flu just days prior to our chat, she’s still made the trip across the Atlantic for an onslaught of promotion. After a few years out of the limelight post the release of 2022’s Sometimes, Forever, she’s back on the circuit once again. And while it’s gratifying to be close to the release of what she says is her favourite album yet, the rush of an album campaign can be as disorienting as it is exciting.

“It feels like I haven’t had to do an album release for so long. Color Theory I did a bunch of press for, but I didn’t tour it. And then, on the last record I made, I was just trying to be very mindful of where I was at mentally and take a step back from a lot of stuff,” the the 27-year-old Allison tells me. “It’s been really interesting to want to let the music and the art consume me. I feel like I’m finding my footing. There’s a lot of mixed stuff.”

Multiple times over the course our conversation, Allison describes herself as “pensive.” The adjective is apt. Known for lyrics that are as funny as they are sharp — her Sometimes, Forever producer Daniel Lopatin of Oneohtrix Point Never raved about “all that sweet and sour stuff she has going on” — Allison has become a go-to artist for sad girls, overthinkers, and indieheads everywhere. A Soccer Mommy record is best paired with a poster-covered room, an old CD player, beat-up Converse and a worn-out journal. With influences such as Avril Lavigne, Sheryl Crowe, The Cure, and the Jesus and Mary Chain, Allison is the effortless heir to infectious late-90s and 2000s grunge. The music is fuzzy, infectious, guitar-driven, occasionally self-deprecating, and, more than anything, it’s begging to be played on repeat.

In the years since her 2018 debut Clean, Soccer Mommy has gained an ever-expanding cult following. In that time, Allison’s musical prowess has grown in tandem, blossoming from penning simple, lo-fi indie licks into making textured, dynamic arrangements that still have a no-nonsense, guitar-driven appeal.

Allison is nonetheless a tempered indie star: profoundly grateful for the creative opportunities she’s been given, she still understands and accepts — for now — the drawbacks of a career like hers. Indeed, much of Evergreen, her latest artistic era, has been about maturing into a phase of her career that moves away from teenage crazes into a softer and more thoughtful approach to both professional musicianship and life writ large.

She broke out almost by accident. The daughter of a neuroscientist and a teacher, Allison was born in Zürich and raised in Nashville, and her obsession with music started the way most kids’ do. She’d play early 00s CDs with her dad in the car, wander around with a toy guitar, and idolise pop stars. But around the age of five or six, she began to write songs, and the pull grew stronger. “I was just really hooked by it,” she remembers. “Honestly, I can’t remember ever not wanting it. That sounds crazy, but when I was a kid, once I started doing it, I was so obsessed with it. You have those childish dreams of wanting to be a star, but it kind of never went away.”

Allison attended a performing arts school, where she started to come into her own. She’d perform with friends, burn her own CDs, develop her musical palette beyond the PG-13 records she’d grown up with. And yet, at the same time, adultish realism began to set in. “About the time I went into high school, the dream was dead a little bit,” she admits. “Probably when I was fifteen, there started to be this thing in my brain of acceptance. I was like, ‘I’m not gonna not go to college and try to just make it.' I loved playing music, and I was always happy to do it at any chance I got, but I didn’t have the confidence to sell myself, and it felt so strange and unnatural to me."

She committed herself instead to study at New York University, starting her freshman year as a prospective-but-undecided English major. That first jump away from home was as difficult as it was rewarding: “There’s still really great things about it, but it was hard,” she remembers. At peace with her own company, she’d often ride the subway alone, taking herself to do anything and everything she wanted: “I would go to shows alone and just do what I enjoyed doing without the need of it being a social thing. I really loved that. I think that gave me a lot of freedom that I wanted really bad.”

Music, she insisted at the time, was to remain a hobby. “It wasn’t that depressing for me [to give up on the idea of being a professional musician]," she says of her mindset at the time. "I knew that it didn’t mean I couldn’t make music or write songs or do the thing that I loved. It’s just, I think the more depressing thing is trying really hard and getting beat down."

And yet, every time she was asked to play, she said yes. She’d go to Long Island on school nights, sit in transit for hours just to play for rooms of four or five people, hop on any bill or any session. She started releasing music on Bandcamp — and people actually started buying it — but she barely told anyone in her offline life about what was happening for her on the Internet.

There was never a single moment when Allison knew Soccer Mommy was going to take over. Even after she signed her first label deal and decided to really “give it a go,” she took a leave of absence from school rather than dropping out. Practicality always gnawed at the back of her mind. Maybe, she admits, it was also just disbelief that such a thing could happen to her: “In my mind I was like, ‘Cool! I’ll get to have vinyl. That’s cool. My life’s not gonna change that much.’ It was more of a passion project. And then, they were like, ‘You could do some touring?’ And I said, ‘Oh, that would be fun. I’ll take some time off school.’ And then as I started doing tours, it just became so clear that I wasn’t going back to school.”

As far as happy accidents go, this one was welcome to Allison: “When Clean came out and everything was so big, it was like: 'Where is this coming from?' I thought no one was going to care about this album that I put out. I didn’t think it was going to change my life in the way it did. That was huge.”

What kicked off next was a whirlwind. Allison moved back to Nashville, put out records, toured, and repeated the cycle over and over again. It was the stuff of dreams for her, truly. But that wasn’t all that came with her success. “I look back on all of these years, and in some ways, I’m like, ‘God. It’s been so amazing.’ There have been so many great things,” she says. “But there was also a lot of really awful – and I feel ungrateful even saying it sometimes – stuff too.”

That feeling that Allison struggled with is one that is now, finally, having its day in popular discourse. She got to do everything she loved, yes, but there were also things that came with the art that made her miserable. The demands of being a professional musician in modern times require a level of openness to the public that borders at times on invasive. The touring schedule of any entertainer can be draining at best and yet, those who choose this career are expected to fully submit to it without question because of the nebulous idea that it’s the dream.

“I’m a really private person. I’m shy in a lot of ways. I think it was very, very shocking to suddenly feel like I had gotten this thing that I wanted, but also me wasn’t what it wanted. Does that make sense?” she tells me. “It was very destructive for me, I think, for a long time. I still had a lot of great times and great moments, but I think it kind of took the joy out of it for a little bit. I still loved writing music, and nothing could hinder me from doing that part, but it did make me feel like I was just on this road that eventually was going to crash and burn.”

Being an indie musician today often means being all things to all people. There are tours, finances, press rounds, social media, merch and all the rest of it to be tended to. Managing a burgeoning career as an artist is a lot more like managing a small business than many might like to acknowledge. “A lot of the time I have moments where I wonder if I have what it takes to do this,” she admits.

In the end, quarantine was something of a saving grace for Allison. When the world shut down after the release of Color Theory, she got to cancel her tours and promotion and just be. She got to figure out what she, Sophie Allison, wanted instead of always thinking about what Soccer Mommy needed.

“It forced me to stop,” she says of the period. “I think I’m never going to be the person to stop myself. I don’t have that kind of self-control. It gave me some perspective on what makes me happy.”

This step back signified a major period of transition for Allison. After years on the go, she sunk into the calm and enjoyed it. “I look at my life, and I really love the part of it when it’s peaceful,” she admits. “Obviously, I have a more chaotic life than a lot of people I know. But when I’m at home, I’m just enjoying the calm and doing things that are relaxing like going for a walk, exercising, sitting and having a coffee with a friend and catching up, going to a movie, going to bed early.”

In the years after Color Theory and Sometimes, Forever, Allison had a second “growing up.” Some of this was natural, the kind that happens when the constant rush of one’s early 20s fades and it becomes time to settle into adulthood. These transitions sowed the thematic seeds of her fourth album.

As a project, Evergreen is rooted in change. Songs like “Changes,” “Lost,” “M,” and its title track all deal with the growing pains of life, of moving between a reality that you used to know and the realities you know are coming. The record’s production matures to match these themes. While Allison hasn’t lost her 90s-inspired edge, it’s been paired with softer elements like wispy strings, atmospheric vocals, moody and soft acoustic strums. All of this, she explains, is intentional.

“This is going to sounds so stupid, but I’ll look around or I’ll be talking to someone younger than me that I think is really cool and I’m just like, ‘Wow, I’m getting older. I’m not in my early 20s. I’m in a different place,’” she says, still slightly taken aback as she recalls the realisation. “I used to — and I still do — love this fun, high school type of pop music. But I’m not living that now. When I wrote Clean, I was in college. It was such a different thing.”

On “Driver,” for example, Allison tackles the later stages of romance, the ones that only come after a real length of time is spent in a relationship. These certainly aren’t the highs and lows of puppy love, but they are, as Allison rightfully points out, far more genuine and arguably far more romantic, too. Like any good Soccer Mommy song, it’s cloaked in humour — her playful side extends throughout Evergreen, one song on the record even being inspired by her wife in the game Stardew Valley — but its heart is earnest. The scene is set on a chaotic drive, one partner missing their turns and the other cheekily veering them back on course. Written about her partner of eight years, the song describes the comfort of being with someone who knows all of your quirks, all of your shortcomings, and takes them all in stride.

“It’s not this honeymoon type of love. It’s not: ‘Oh, I’m scared of losing you.’ It’s not any of those things. It’s actually just the comfortability, the beautiful aspects of it,” Allison explains. This isn’t a song about some dorm-room crush. Like the rest of Evergreen, “Driver” is just one of those songs that only comes after some real-life experience.

But some parts of Allison’s transition to proper adulthood weren’t just natural crossfades. Rather, they were harsh, painful, and sudden. After Sometimes, Forever, Allison suffered a deeply profound loss, altering her world forever. To get through it, she knew a new level of responsibility was required of her. She could no longer rely on her old self or old ways of coping. Part of her second growing up, then, was also entering a second life, a reality that she knew she would have to spend forever adjusting to. Writing Evergreen became Allison’s way of starting that process of moving through instead of grasping for the past.

“Obviously, on the album, there’s a lot of talk about loss specifically and not having someone there anymore. That’s a huge change. And I feel like I haven’t felt a change so sudden and so drastic since going away to college. Everything was suddenly completely different between one day and the next,” she says. “It’s this push and pull of trying to cling to parts of what you had or what once was, but also you can’t, and it’s gone and you’re different. It can really rock your shit. You can’t just get back to a happiness you once had or a certain way you felt before in your life. It’s like, you’re different now, and you have to change a lot.”

On “M,” Allison addresses this head on. Anchored by a cool, clean guitar riff, the song takes off with an aching chorus. Melodically, it’s simple but soaring, expanding by the end from a slick grunge ballad into a sweeping cinematic soundscape. And thematically, it’s Allison at perhaps her most emotive yet (which is saying something).

On a first play of Evergreen, I took myself for a walk in my local park. It’s my own ritual to treat hearing any new album for the first time like an event. When those first few bittersweet guitar slides of “M” came on, I started to tingle. It was a feeling a song hasn’t made me feel in years. “I miss you / Like a loyal dog,” Allison croons in the first verse. By the chorus, she’s grasping at straws: “I don’t mind spending time on a lie / But it’s taking all I have to give / ‘Cause in my dreams I’m still not free / I feel those hands around my neck / Like the truth is killing me.” It’s clearly a song about loss – devastating loss – but it's not just about missing someone. It’s about the delusion that tells you it’s not forever, the yearning for something that doesn’t exist, the inability to forget what it used to be like, the desire to always hold on to what it used to be like. It hit me like a sucker punch: there was nothing I could do but sit on the nearest bench and stare wide eyed until it was over.

When I tell all of this to Allison — to my slight surprise — she smiles. After all, this is, in a way, her intended effect. “I love to write things that are catchy, but I like when people can see that there’s thought in it. I’m trying to find something that can be inspiring for me and hopefully for other people. I love when fans really see a connection and deeper meanings,” she says.

“In my day-to-day life, I’m a very goofy person. I make light of a lot of stuff, and I don’t really talk about my emotions or my feelings at all with pretty much anyone. But, I really love analyzing, and I love getting deep with people and having those conversations to talk about not just your feelings, but your views on life and the world,” she explains. Songwriting is her place to air those thoughts.

The great marvel of Allison’s music-making process is that she writes completely alone. It always begins, she tells me, with just her and a guitar. And even before the music comes, it’s about something she knows she needs to say. “With any music I end up writing, it’s often something that I’ve been thinking about a lot,” she explains. She might not betray it, but she’s always sorting through her emotions. She’ll play devil’s advocate with herself, consider a problem from all angles before she finally comes to a conclusion. By the time she sits down to write, whatever she’s been chewing on — in all its iterations — just spills out of her. This method thus explains why Soccer Mommy songs often feel so biting, so coy, and so true.

“The beautiful part for me is not when anyone has heard the music. It’s when I’m writing it and I’m making songs and recording them. That’s where it’s so pure for me,” she admits. The rest of it — all that “industry stuff” — is just noise. And, she ventures, capitalism. Writing is Allison’s one true constant.

“Changes,” fittingly, was the first song that took shape from Evergreen. It was written during the Sometimes, Forever sessions, but at the time, Allison thought she’d scrap it. “If I can’t get stuff done, it’s jut because I don’t have anything to say,” she explains. “When I start having things to say, that’s when it all starts piecing together and usually comes with sonic inspiration, whether it’s new chords or voicings or trying things out on the neck.”

But as her life took the unexpected turns it did, “Changes” took on a new relevance. The rest of the writing came later, mostly in Nashville and mostly at home. “M” was the next finished song, followed by “Lost.” Then, the floodgates opened.

She brought the songs to Ben Allen at Maze Studios in Atlanta. She’d shopped her project around, but, meeting him, she knew he understood her musical language and frame of reference. “He instantly gave me a lot of confidence in what we were doing,” she says. “It felt like we had the time to sit there and do what you would do in your own house, like mess around until you find stuff that’s really inspiring.”

Allison let herself be consumed by recording Evergreen. After an intense period of heaviness, the making of this record afforded her some catharsis. She spent her days in the studio, her nights meeting up with friends in the city, trying new restaurants, lounging in coffee shops, letting herself soak in her new surroundings.

What Allison and Allen created is, she tells me, her best work to date. Admittedly, she feels that way every time she releases a new project. But with Evergreen, she tells me, she truly feels that she’s pushed the boundaries of her sound and her talents. In doing so, she’s perhaps also created her most intimate project to date, one that feels soft, gentle, and warm.

“I really wanted it to have a little bit of folksiness. I didn’t want to make a folk record, but I wanted there to be some of that energy,” she continues. “I wanted to mix stuff like acoustic guitars with atmospheric, beautiful sounds. I wanted it to feel like a summer night scene.”

Visually, the universe of Evergreen borrows much from nature imagery and the natural world. As she examined the competing gains and losses that have marked her journey, she found it helpful to find living metaphors in the world around her. “I’m a Romantic in the capital ‘r’ sense,” she says. “For me, it’s like, you look at the world, and there’s beauty and there’s ugliness, there’s pain and there’s light, there’s all these things that you can relate to… That can be a source of peace for me.”

But nature also brings its own creature comforts for Allison, too. In Nashville, much of her youth was spent at bonfires or roaming around in trails with friends. At night — even to this day — in the summer she’d wander down to the city’s steeplechase, sitting in the open grass to breathe and to think.

It was also in the outdoors that Allison also felt most connected to those she had lost. “The person I was writing about, nature is just something that always makes me think of them and connect,” Allison tells me. She was brought closer to her past in trees on the sidewalk, in flowers in meadows. “It was really important to me that this was reflected in the album art, in everything.”

The cover photo, a black and white image of Allison gazing off in a field, was taken in Colorado. The intent had been to find a spot in Wyoming, but at the time they set out for the shoot, the snow hadn’t melted farther north and wouldn’t have given the image the midsummer haziness she was going for. Later, to film the video for “M,” Allison and her crew made their way up to Wyoming, near the Colorado border. Her dad’s native state, some of her fondest memories are from childhoods spent up in the mountains there. Incorporating this scenery into the world of her album, then, was an act of reverence, remembrance, and a welcome hit of nostalgia.

As Allison approaches the release of Evergreen, she’s just trying to stick to that truth, that connectedness she felt during the making of the record. “I’m trying to do a back-to-basics,” she says. While, yes, she hopes the record does well, that’s not her focus. The strength of the project — and her astonishing track record — speaks for itself. Her joy has already come from making something she’s truly proud of, that earned her own seal of approval. Contentment is Allison’s new desired state of mind. “It’s more about finding peace and happiness and not needing to strive for success – even success that may be reachable but that you’d have to sacrifice things in your life for,” she says of her priorities now. “It’s just finding that balance.”