Soccer Mommy Pares Back for Evergreen 

Soccer Mommy’s fourth studio album, Evergreen, is something of a return to the artist’s familiar sound, eschewing the more experimental and electronic approach of 2022’s Sometimes, Forever for stripped-back production that centers Sophie Allison’s soft vocals and insightful lyrics. 

Allison, who will perform at The Depot on March 8, says working on Evergreen was “massively different” from working on Sometimes, Forever. “It was much more controlled and focused and quiet,” she says. “When we were making Sometimes, Forever, it felt really exciting and energetic. And every day was a lot of chaos and a lot of trying new things and just seeing what … worked and what was cool and experimenting a lot.” 

In contrast, making Evergreen was a process of executing a deliberate vision. She wanted to make something “that just felt very true to me,” Allison says. There was less emphasis on pushing boundaries and more emphasis on being honest to the songs themselves while still leaving room to find interesting ways to express them. “There was still a lot of stuff like that,” she says, “and experimenting with new sonic ideas there, but they were just a little less electronic — less going for these things that are a little bit more out of my zone.”

“The future looks so different now and it can feel very nostalgic, even though it’s stuff that hasn’t really existed outside of what you pictured.”

The focus on no-frills honesty makes sense for an album so rife with ruminations on loss. Almost every song explores the biting reality of coping in one way or another — loss and grief, loss and time, loss and memory — though Allison is reticent to speak on the specific loss that formed the emotional foundation for Evergreen, the album says more than enough. In “Dreaming of Falling,” for example, she sings, “And I can feel the memory tainted / By the way I’ve changed / Yeah, I could look back, but it’s not the same / I see from the shadows now / Half of my life is behind me and the / Other has changed somehow.” In Soccer Mommy fashion, Allison’s lyrics on Evergreen are ephemeral windows that open to rich emotional clarity, even as they pass by the sorest wounds. 

I asked Allison about that line in “Dreaming of Falling” — “Half of my life is behind me and the / Other has changed somehow” — and if she ever feels nostalgic for things that never ended up happening, for daydreams of futures that never came to pass. “You imagine a lot of things in your life and relationships,” she says. “You imagine where those will take you. You imagine where friendships will take you … and they get shifted when something comes to change that. Even simple things like … somebody moves away, and you suddenly [have] a shifted view. The future looks so different now and it can feel very nostalgic, even though it’s stuff that hasn’t really existed outside of what you pictured.” 

“I wanted it to still have this feeling of acoustic guitar and vocals and hold true to the chords and everything, because the chords are really pretty, and I didn’t want to lose that”

In “Changes,” the record’s longest track, Allison sings about how everything we experience in life at some point becomes a memory, flattened by time no matter how precious. The track opens with acoustic strumming and wafts into its chorus like a cloud: “Changes / I don’t wanna face it / It’s hard enough to know that / Everything will fade to / Memory in time.” Allison says it was a particularly tricky one to get right. “I wanted it to still have this feeling of acoustic guitar and vocals and hold true to the chords and everything, because the chords are really pretty, and I didn’t want to lose that,” she says. “But I really wanted it to have this air to it. It was one of the songs that we did during pre-production that was really fun to figure out how to make these kinds of soundscapes — how to make them blend into the songs and not, you know, build something that’s too overtaking.”

“I think that so often you hear albums that just blow you away, where it’s amazing songs but it also feels like you’re in this specific mood or in this specific place”

Having the opportunity to speak with Allison, I found myself wanting to ask about what had happened in her life to inspire an album focused on loss and processing grief, but she asked ahead of time to avoid the subject, which I understand. For one thing, we obviously don’t know each other. It wasn’t that I wanted to pry so much as I found that, even as Evergreen circles these kinds of grief-filled emotions, it finds a way to render them that feels approachable, less scary and more defined, even as they move out of focus. I wonder what it will be like for her to return to this world she’s created with Evergreen. She says she seldom revisits her earlier work but that, as with every album, she tried to conjure something specific. “I think that so often you hear albums that just blow you away, where it’s amazing songs but it also feels like you’re in this specific mood or in this specific place,” she says. “It kind of takes you out of your own world and into something else, and I think that’s really special.”

There’s some levity in Evergreen, too. “Abigail” is Allison’s ode to the character of the same name in the popular video game Stardew Valley, a farming simulator in which you can form relationships with locals and even marry them. Her play style in the game is “going for everything,” she says. She grew up playing a similar game called Harvest Moon, so she loves Stardew. “I like to complete the goals and discover, especially things that have rewards that unlock something … I love that kind of stuff, but I also really like the dating aspect.” 

  Follow Soccer Mommy on Instagram at @soccermommyband, and get tickets to see her live when she performs with Hana Vu on March 8 at The Depot.

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