One of the most critically decorated and understated songwriters of her generation, the Nashville-native dives deep into love, loss and nature on her newly-released fourth studio album. Sitting down with Wonderland Features Editor Ben Tibbits, she talks fame, Bandcamp, and keeping the listener guessing.
It can’t help feeling poetic—painfully so—that the first song on Sophie Allison’s new album, Evergreen, is entitled “Lost”. Much of the rhetoric that you’ll read around the album leans into the tragic passing of her mother during its making, and how the event shaped the foundations of the album. But to say that the record revolves around loss is an unjust evaluation—there’s depth beyond the singular. Still, the tingling sensation of grief is dissolved into the very core of Allison’s lyrical ideas. Fundamentally, although her writing feels so personal that it pierces your soul and breaks down your boundaries, we, the listener, see a shard of glass rather than the full mirror. “It’s really easy in my mind,” she says. “Even if I write a song that’s really personal—while somebody can hear the lyrics and get the gist—it’s not really letting them in. It’s more of a reflection on something that happened, and sewing together bits and pieces of different people, different situations. So it never feels like I’m just sitting there and telling someone this thing about my life that everyone I know in person is going to know what it’s about. It’s very personal, but it’s still for strangers.”
Allison, or Soccer Mommy to her many scores of sad girl disciples, explains this to me on an overcast October afternoon from the warmth of her London hotel. She’s on this side of the Atlantic for a swift visit in the run up to releasing her fourth studio record, frequenting a city that she “kind of hated” when first visiting but has grown to love through “eating meat pies, and going to pubs and drinking beer in the middle of the day.” The 27-year-old makes an affable and contemplative ephemeral companion; honest enough to feel rooted in reality but vague enough to keep an easily distracted interviewer interested. Although she’s happy to humour a journalist and chat with the odd fan (because “it’s just a bunch of people that like music and like what I’m making”), fame has never fitted too comfortably. “I try to deal with it as little as possible,” she laughs. “I hate social media with all my soul. I’m not really the type of person that wants to share everything I’m doing with people, and I don’t want to have people watching and commenting on my every move. So I try to just stay distanced from it—I go on and I do what I need to do.”
Allison, though, remains grateful for her circumstances. Augmenting the contemporary indie rock canon with three (now four) beloved LPs and amounting tours with the likes of slowdive, Phoebe Bridgers and Paramore, all her success is a welcome surprise for an unassuming character who loved playing music but was “not going to put all of my hopes and dreams on this very unrealistic thing.” Raised in Nashville, a place as drowsed in songwriting lineage as any, “caught between small town and city,” music—beyond the location’s archetypical—was hard to avoid for Allison growing up. “That whole perception [of Nashville], that’s all there for sure, it definitely exists,” she observes. “But as a native and somebody that grew up there, it wasn’t really a part of my life. There’s a lot of music there besides country music. When I was growing up there were a lot of venues for punk music, garage rock, and there was a lot of psych rock happening too. Now it’s moved more towards this indie rock scene with punk and electronic stuff mixed in there.”
Although ”since [she] was five or six [she] always wanted to do [music],” Allison never truly pursued it in her youth, accepting that she’d always write and play but that it was unlikely she’d make money out of doing so. “I wanted to start recording stuff and putting it on like Bandcamp for myself, just because it’s what I love to do and I wanted to get out of my comfort zone.” Her endeavours exceeded all expectations, and it was through Bandcamp that Allison signed a record deal whilst still in her teens. “It’s been literally my entire adult life,” she reflects. “I first signed a deal when I was 19, so it’s just been everything. I’ve grown a lot in that time period and thinking back to when I was younger and when I got signed, and when Clean came out and started to blow up, I had no idea what I was in for and what I was getting into. It changed my life, it was such a blessing that I never thought was going to come.” Allison’s aforementioned studio debut album, Clean, was released in March 2018 via Fat Possum Records to ardent acclaim. It’s about “being 18 basically, and going out in the world and seeing a lot of different stuff, and heartbreak and love and those kinds of things,” and is a mature, concise, and emotionally complex body of work. One of the best inaugural records of the year, Clean quickly planted Allison amongst her generation’s most sincere and generous songwriters, and she became a paradigm of a time when female US indie rock artists found a pocket of popularity on a widening scale.
Clean proved the beginning of a stellar run of albums to come, all highly commended by critics and fans alike, masterworks in their own manner. Allison’s sophomore, color theory, ensued two years after Clean, now via Loma Vista. An opus drenched in atmospheric texture, synth-driven synthetics and melancholic mediation, the album viscerally documented a difficult, elongated period in Allison’s life—the Soccer Mommy record-making credo. “An album is usually about a year and a half or so of my life put together, so it ends up being about a lot of the things that I’m dealing with over longer periods of time. color theory is much more being caught in this place of having a lot of different emotions and anxiety and depression.”
Next came 2022’s Sometimes, Forever, which saw Allison push her sound ever further into unexplored sonic territory. Starkly sonically disparate from the power pop and conscious anthems of Clean with color theory providing the sole segue, the songwriter’s third album brought in a surprising but highly effective producer. Daniel Lopatin, revered for his retrofuturism and experimental electronica under the moniker Oneohtrix Point Never, brings a brooding ambience and spatial synergy to a record that questions life’s highs and lows with enveloping elegance. For Allison, it’s a fainter tunnel into her inner destitution. “Sometimes, Forever is a lot lighter,” she feels. “It has some creepy, darker songs, but the headspace of it is a lot more at peace in a lot of ways. There’s some stuff on there that is really emotional but there’s a lot of it that’s more about just trying to figure things out about yourself a little bit. It doesn’t feel as serious at certain points.”
When in came to choosing the sound for her fourth album Evergreen, Allison was driven by the instinctive tone of the songs that she had already written, enlisting Deer Hunter and Animal Collective collaborator Ben H. Allen to chisel a sound that feels like a return to the Soccer Mommy nuclei of her Bandcamp days; accentuating a yearning tenderness within that. “I really wanted to shy away from using synthesisers and drum machines, and I wanted it to feel natural and breathy and airy. And I wanted it to be intimate, and for the music to feel elevated and have a lot of atmospheric qualities, rather than big productions.” From the music videos to the flowers on the album cover and the title itself, themes of nature trickle across the work. “It’s so about the songs,” she says. “They all felt folky to me, and singer songwriter-y in a way. I wanted to put the root of the song up front, so the chords and the singing. There’s a lot to talk about on the album about nature and earthy elements, and I wanted it to reflect that in a visual sense.”
Like the three albums prior to it, Evergreen is a developed, questioning and emotionally bare elegy that timestamps a time in the life of its narrator. None of Allison’s albums have shied away from being plaintive, but with the tone of the subject matter, her fourth feels particularly poignant. Rather than a means to uplift Allison from the grief she was experiencing, the album acts as a canvas for her thoughts—whether broad brushstrokes, outlined sketches or messy blotches, Allison left it all on the paper. “It wasn’t quite cathartic, but it was in a sense. Mostly it just felt like a really good space for me to go over my thoughts and organise them, and capture my emotion. But I didn’t feel relief or anything in making it, it felt more like trying to nail down everything that I’m thinking.” It’s a process that unravels across the record’s 41 minute runtime, from the assuredness of anthemic single “Driver” to the indifference of the broody, off-kilter “Anchor” and the haunting gentility of the title-track closer. Rich and resplendent yet sharp and abject, it’s an album made with care and contemplation, a sublime addition to Allison’s wonderful discography.
Next? A comprehensive UK and EU tour has been announced for next Spring, which will follow a stint travelling the States, kicking off in January. As she has been since a plucky teen sharing fragments of her soul on Bandcamp, Soccer Mommy will be a vessel for others, an unreachable friend, a stained-glass odyssey. “I think music makes you reflect on things that remind you of your own situation,” she concludes. “It’s about people looking at themselves and approaching it wherever they need to take it.”
Listen to Evergreen…
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