Soccer Mommy makes getting lost sound like a new beginning. On Evergreen, her fourth and most poignant record to date, it sort of literally is: ‘Lost’ is the title of its opening track, and upon its release, Sophie Allison said that it “feels like something new and something old at the same time.” Her lyrics are typically pensive, coming from a place of already being at her wit’s end, where the music’s therapeutic potential feels distant. But the refrain – “Lost in a way that don’t make sense/ Lost in a way that never ends” – easily sticks in your head, the strings instantly tug at your heart, and Allison strums her acoustic guitar like she’s still anticipating her next thought. Soccer Mommy’s music is never totally inert or bleak, but Allison moves through the shadows with the same sensitivity that she’s able to capture flickers of hope. But unlike so many others trading in melancholy singer-songwriter music, Allison won’t trick so much as tease her way towards it: hope has to feel honest and earned. Maybe it’s there, but it’s rarely the destination. Soccer Mommy just colours in the emptiness enough to see a song through, and start again.
‘Lost’ isn’t just about the inevitability of change, but all the possible realities that pass by as a result of it, forcing you to live with the one that never measures up to what you’ve dreamt. The first thing Allison acknowledges she doesn’t know about this person is “what’s in her dreams,” an admission that sets the stage for the album’s fundamental aloneness: to Allison, dreams are a gateway to one’s inner world, and the only dreams she has real access to are her own: “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,” she confesses on the devastating ‘M’, a distorted guitar solo rendering it more like a nightmare. On her previous album, 2022’s Oneohtrix Point Never-produced Sometimes, Forever, Allison sang about losing herself in a different kind of dream, the kind that’s brought her success but made her “miss feeling like a person.” Here, a dream is simply a version of reality that may not exist but allows you, however briefly or in vain, to forget the very fact of missing someone.
Allison doesn’t detail the profound loss that informs so much of Evergreen, but she understands that it, too, has no end. ‘Changes’, an acoustic ballad she cast aside during the Sometimes, Forever sessions, a record that invited heady electronics, offers a picture of where it leaves her: singing to herself, grappling with the idea of change, drifting into the illusion of forever. You can feel the hurt rushing in with each hit of the snare, even as the production wanders into dream-pop territory; music, to Soccer Mommy, doesn’t feel like catharsis so much as “pressing on the bruise,” to use her expression in ‘Salt in Wound’. In that song and ‘Thinking of You’, being stuck in thought is a mirror, and the only reasonable response, to the way reality fades into memory, where everything is frozen, perhaps, to perfection. But even memory gets tainted by the fallibility of change, of us as humans: “All I have are dust and ashes/ Cupped between my hands / Slipping through my fingers ‘til they’re empty once again,” she realizes on ‘Dreaming of Falling’.
Dreaming – just closing your eyes – she also suggests, is a lot like falling. Optimism, whether cautious or false, is something Soccer Mommy mostly wafts in and out of, but there are songs on Evergreen that legitimately pick up the pulse: ‘Driver’ is a grungy rocker about a loving relationship grounding your most reckless tendencies, while ‘Abigail’ – an ode to a whole different kind of romance that’s named after Allison’s purple-haired wife in Stardew Valley – coasts on the warmest synth and guitar tones. But even those bright spots don’t stop the album’s downward trajectory. “Even when I open my eyes again,” Allison sighs, “I still feel the drop somehow.” If anything, her music aims to sink down to the core of that truth, even against her impulses. To that end, she reconnects with Soccer Mommy’s roots after experimenting with its sonic dimensions on her last two albums, enlisting producer Ben H. Allen III to help provide texture and atmosphere to the organic recordings. As she puts it on ‘Thinking of You’: “Pull back my skin, see what remains.” On ‘M’, it’s the revelation that the dream is as real to her as anything. Rather than ending the song right there, or fading it out, a flute-led outro lets the feeling hang in the air – and maybe carries it someplace new.
