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In a Nashville neighborhood miles away from the city’s honky tonks and sloshy bachelorette parties, a Ford pickup is parked in front of a modest house with shutters the color of jade glass. It would be a completely unremarkable suburban scene if not for an array of stickers stuck to the grubby truck. One on the bumper reads “goddess on the loose,” the phrase surrounded by a constellation of tiny stars. Another plainly asserts, “A woman & her truck/It’s a beautiful thing.” There’s a sun-bleached Buffy the Vampire Slayer logo on the rear window, alongside a sticker that poses a question one might ask at an occult initiation: “Do you believe in Magick?” The truck belongs to Sophie Allison, who records music as Soccer Mommy, and this is her new home.
Allison answers the door in a purple tie-dye shirt, dark jeans, and Prada platform loafers, welcoming me in with a small smile. The 24-year-old recently pierced her ears for the first time, and on this blustery February day they’re studded with little pentagrams. Black cat-eye makeup extends out from the side of her sockets, a look that has become her signature ever since she first gained a legion of devout followers with her disarmingly personal indie rock songs four years ago. In January, Allison and Julian Powell, her boyfriend of six years and Soccer Mommy’s guitarist, became first-time homeowners, moving into the cozy spot complete with a pool that pops up and out of their backyard like a big blue button.
Although the former owner’s name is still on the mailbox, the couple have started to make the place their own. Fizzy water in hand, Allison takes me on a tour of the home’s various nooks, from a hideaway attic to the closet where she stores a color-changing lightsaber. Upstairs in the bedroom, a Mazzy Star poster hangs above a table mirror enveloped in the wings of a fairy that’s vaguely sexy and goth, in a Beetlejuice kind of way. Keeping guard over a dimly-lit corner is Allison’s small, plastic dragon Abigail, named after a blue-haired character in the beloved farm-simulation video game Stardew Valley. Close to where Allison and Powell rest their heads is a faded print of Rembrandt’s 17th-century painting “The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp,” which features a huddle of surgeons curiously looking on as a doctor peels away the skin of a corpse’s forearm to reveal the bones and muscles beneath. Looking at the morbid painting, Allison says she once aspired to be a surgeon, even though she faints at the sight of blood.
In a few weeks, Allison and Powell will trade their new digs for hotels and a cramped van as they hit the road ahead of Soccer Mommy’s third album, Sometimes, Forever, which was produced by Oneohtrix Point Never mastermind Daniel Lopatin. The collaboration between Allison, a self-described “country girl” whose music has stuck close to the realm of rock, and Lopatin, who is best known for esoteric electronic experimentation, paranoid scores for films like Uncut Gems, and more recently, making neon disco-pop with the Weeknd, is unexpected. But both attest that their creative union was born of mutual admiration.
As a longtime Oneohtrix Point Never fan, Allison was excited when her label, the eclectic indie Loma Vista, suggested Lopatin as a producer. “That would be awesome if you could get him,” she remembers thinking, “but I doubt it.” As it happens, Lopatin turned out to be a big fan of Soccer Mommy’s swirling second record, 2020’s Color Theory, which is marked by rich synth textures that bubble beneath the album’s surface. The two hopped on the phone in late 2020 and, as Lopatin recalls over email, “Soph was excited about Stardew Valley. I probably wanted to talk about power pop. We got along really well right away.” But it took some months before the band was able to get together with Lopatin at Nashville’s Sound Emporium studio—he was a little busy working on the Weeknd’s recent world-conquering album, Dawn FM.
Allison has little desire to work with a co-writer and admits that she can be a “little bit territorial” when it comes to her music. “I just want stuff to be uniquely mine,” she adds. But she felt in sync with Lopatin and wanted him to “go crazy” with the production. Lopatin responded by enveloping her songs in lush atmospherics, like the sparkle that turbo-charges the infatuated bliss of “With U,” where Allison sings of how her boyfriend’s eyes “cut deep like a knife, and they’re teaching me how to bleed.”
“Sophie finds magical ways to complicate her bubblegum melodies with a subtle weirdness: a twisted chord, a bent texture, some dark comedy,” Lopatin says. “It’s addictive to listen to all that sweet and sour stuff she has going on, so I just tried to amplify that.”
Allison wanted Sometimes, Forever to capture the live Soccer Mommy sound, imperfections and all. Allison and Lopatin bonded over ’80s bands that hit the sweet spot between dreaminess and urgency, like the Cure, Siouxsie and the Banshees, and the Jesus and Mary Chain. “We both like bratty, melancholy stuff with a ton of atmosphere to it,” Lopatin says. He also points to “Losing True,” a 1982 track by the folk-pop sister group the Roches, as inspiration for Allison’s increasingly intricate vocal arrangements. “I’d say that song is the birth of dream pop,” he muses. “And Sophie’s record is the death of it!”
While Sometimes, Forever expands Soccer Mommy’s sound, it continues the tradition of visceral lyricism that initially established Allison among a vanguard of young, emotionally incisive female musicians. Her songs trace the knotty exit wounds of existence: loneliness, depression, betrayal, paranoia. She picks at this scar tissue relentlessly, as if breaking it apart will reduce the pain. “There has to be a reason you wrote all these things,” she says of her songwriting philosophy. “It has to lead you somewhere.”
Levity arrives through her singing voice, which is conversational and a little disaffected. On “Feel It All the Time,” a twangy quarter-life-crisis song reminiscent of classic Sheryl Crow, she lilts, “I’m just 22 going on 23, already worn down from everything.” The casual way she digs into her darkest thoughts dismisses any hint of melodrama.
“Her lyrics itch a spot that you can’t reach,” says Lindsey Jordan, another fearless young indie rocker who makes her own evocative music under the name Snail Mail. The two became friends early in their respective careers, and Jordan speaks of her peer’s work with the conviction of a diehard fan: “I wouldn’t even want to talk about another band if I didn’t wholeheartedly think that she was the very sickest that we have.” Lopatin concurs, praising Allison as “one of the best songwriters today.”
Before her possessions shrink down to whatever fits in a few suitcases, Allison wants to squeeze in some thrifting. We pile into her other car, a white Subaru branded with peeling gems that spell out “Soccer Mommy” on the trunk. The first stop on our quest is McKay’s, a gigantic warehouse in west Nashville overflowing with used video games, trading cards, music, DVDS, and books. She’s been shopping here for years and moves through the abundance of media with an instinctual familiarity. After a quick scan of the Game Boy Advance cartridges (she already has all the Pokémon ones on offer), Allison ambles over to the sci-fi DVDs and extracts a copy of the 1996 Dennis Quaid vehicle Dragonheart—she will at least take a glimpse at anything with the word “dragon” in its name.
It quickly becomes apparent that her potential acquisitions are more aesthetic than practical. At one point she semi-seriously considers purchasing a life-size Matrix cutout of Keanu Reeves before rationalizing that her boyfriend probably would not be too pleased with the purchase. But she does need some CDs for her car and, as she browses, she notices two consigned Soccer Mommy albums. “I guess they weren’t loving it,” she quips diplomatically. In the end, she walks away with a pile of shiny discs, including Black Sabbath’s Master of Reality, the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds, and Beyoncé’s self-titled album.
Later that night at Korea House, one of her favorite hole-in-the-wall spots, Allison begins to unpack the themes behind Sometimes, Forever. “It’s always been hard for me to accept the idea that everything is temporary—that good or bad, no feeling lasts forever,” she explains between sips of plum sake. The cyclical nature of emotions has long been a theme of Soccer Mommy songs. On Color Theory, for instance, she likened depression to an inescapable whirlpool and happiness to a firefly that always slips through her fingers. But now, she’s finally learning to coexist with impermanence.
Sophie Allison was born in 1997 in Switzerland to Michelle, an elementary school teacher, and John, a neuroscientist. Two years later the family relocated to Nashville’s historic Belmont-Hillsboro neighborhood, just a few miles down the road from Vanderbilt University, where her father continues to manage a lab. Music City quickly ensnared her. At the age of 5, she begged her parents for a toy guitar autographed by the country music comedians Riders in the Sky. She promptly wrote her first song, a ditty dubbed “What the Heck Is a Cowgirl?” Allison played that cheapo guitar nonstop, to the point that her parents quickly got a nicer one, and lessons—“probably because it sounded so bad,” she says with a laugh.
Songwriting became an abiding presence in Allison’s life from that moment forward. She wrote songs as a precocious tomboy who adored Avril Lavigne and played a variety of sports; as a closed-off middle schooler encountering depression for the first time; and as a teen at the Nashville School of the Arts, where she performed in a swing band and met the friends who helped her learn how to open up emotionally. For her speech as class valedictorian—“Not a big deal, it was an art school”—she wrote a graduation song and performed it with some classmates. Around then, music evolved from being a fun hobby to an outlet for her innermost feelings. “Becoming a more open person definitely helped me learn how to write honestly and not just try to tell a nice story,” she recalls.
In the summer of 2015, shortly before she moved to Manhattan to attend New York University, Allison uploaded the first Soccer Mommy songs to Bandcamp, pulling the moniker from a jokey Twitter name. She had only recently started recording on a Tascam tape recorder in her bedroom, and lovesick early records like Songs for the Recently Sad capture a young woman standing at the precipice of new beginnings. New York could be isolating, but on the bright side, with her roommates preoccupied by the demands of sorority life, Allison had plenty of privacy in her dorm to transform her emotional damage into lo-fi melodies.
Her next homespun album, for young hearts, was released in 2016 on the familial label Orchid Tapes, introducing her to a wider audience. Allison began to pursue a music business major after her freshman year and used class assignments as opportunities to book gigs for herself. At the end of her sophomore year, with a record deal with the Mississippi indie label Fat Possum under her belt, she moved home to Nashville and took what became a permanent leave of absence from college.
Allison’s breakthrough arrived in 2018 via her studio debut, Clean, a collection of wrenching ballads and indie rock jams about the journey through heartache towards self-realization. On that album, Allison is caught between the person she aspires to be, like the self-assured stoner girl of “Cool,” and the unflattering way she sees herself. “I am just a dying flower/I don’t hold the summer in my eyes,” she sings on “Last Girl.”
Her life radically transformed in the wake of Clean. It was thrilling to step into the shoes of a professional musician—in 2018 alone she toured with musical heroes like Paramore, Kacey Musgraves, and Liz Phair—but also disorienting and isolating. “It’s almost like juggling two lives,” she says. “You have life at home and life where you’re in another world where none of your friends are.” Stability started to slip away as more and more people knew her not as Sophie but as Soccer Mommy.
Her next record, Color Theory, was considerably more insular, digging deeper into the issues of physical and mental illness that lingered at the edges of Clean. “I am the problem for me, now and always,” she sang on a shellshocked song called “royal screwup.” A large part of the album found her candidly processing her mother’s terminal illness, which she was diagnosed with when Allison was 12. “Loving you isn’t enough/You’ll still be deep in the ground when it’s done,” she sang on Color Theory’s seven-minute centerpiece, “Yellow Is the Color of Her Eyes.” But funneling these thoughts into music wasn’t the same as actually dealing with them.
By the end of 2019, in the downtime between Color Theory’s completion and release, Allison says she was constantly “menaced by a creeping feeling,” her anxiety at an all-time-high. She was plagued by intrusive thoughts, like burning her house down with herself inside. That scene made its way into one of the first songs written for the new album, “Darkness Forever,” a burned-out brooder that begins with Allison shoving her head in an oven à la Sylvia Plath. She clarifies that this fantasy of expelling her demons by immolation was not about destruction: “I thought of it as enlightening, as if by tearing everything away I could find a sense of relief.” On the final version of the song, she unleashes a scream so bracing that it stunned Lopatin and her bandmates as they watched from the recording booth.
Another Sometimes, Forever song written during this acutely awful period was “Still,” which begins with a thesis statement of sorts: “I don’t know how to feel things small/It’s a tidal wave or nothing at all.” Over a strummed acoustic guitar and tendrils of ghostly synth and electric guitar, Allison matter-of-factly describes a numbness that has driven her to self-harm and suicidal ideation:
I cut a piece out of my thigh
And felt my heart go skydiving
It got me high for a little while
I still don’t know what I was thinking
But I did it still
As the March 2020 kickoff to the Color Theory tour approached, Allison began to worry that she was not “stable” enough to perform; she never considered canceling shows but admits “I wasn’t sure I could do it.” COVID-19 ultimately made the decision for her.
Stuck at home in Nashville, she took a long-overdue moment to survey what her life had become. “I finally had this opportunity to get my shit together and reconfigure the negativity that was going on in my mind all the time,” she says. “I had done a lot of work by myself already, but I needed serious help to understand what was exacerbating certain feelings.” She entered therapy, focused on “getting on the right meds,” and left social media. It was during the first few months of the pandemic that she wrote, with a swiftness that surprised her, the rest of the songs that now comprise Sometimes, Forever. Perhaps even more unexpectedly, those songs were buoyed by a newfound resolve.
These days, Allison refers to herself as a “much more positive person” as she confidently drives through torrential rain, a Buffy keychain dangling from the ignition. We’re on our way to another secondhand destination, a massive compound called GasLamp Antiques. The space is a daunting maze of Victorian mirrors, mid-century modern bar carts, and kitschy puppy planters, and the first thing she wants to show me is a priest’s confessional booth from the 1820s that has been unable to find a new home. “I’ll dabble in the sacrilegious,” she notes of her tendency to wear a cross, but we agree that, at more than $5,000, it’s way out of her price range, and excessive in more ways than one.
As she examines a white wall sconce accented with flowers, Allison tells me how in a few days she’s set to film the video for “Shotgun,” Sometimes, Forever’s swooning lead single. It’s an unabashed ode to Powell, though Allison’s vision of love is once again brutal enough to rip through skin and draw blood: On the sticky chorus, she proclaims that her dedication is as intense as a bullet waiting to be fired. “Real beauty and pain tend to coincide, as do beauty and ugliness,” she says, when asked about the violence that frequently colors her songs. “Love is hard even when it’s easy.”
Later that evening it’s time for band rehearsal in bassist Nick Widener’s basement. The room is overwhelmingly beige aside from a few flourishes like a quilted sign that reads “protect kids not guns,” a photograph of wrinkly Shar Pei puppies that hangs behind the drum kit, and a chalkboard featuring thoughts like “conventional ≠ accessible” that peeks out from behind an acoustic panel. As Allison sets up her pedal board, synth player Rodrigo Avendano calls her over to read a text he received from his OB/GYN wife: A patient currently in labor has the Soccer Mommy song “Circle the Drain” on their birthing playlist. Everyone takes a moment to marvel at the world.
After Powell takes a few stabs at playing the swaggering theme to the Southern vampire show True Blood, the band focus on “Following Eyes,” an eerie Sometimes, Forever track that reads like a Shirley Jackson ghost story. “It wasn’t supposed to be a metaphor for anything,” Allison told me earlier on with a grin, talking about the song’s lurking apparition. “I just wanted to write a spooky tale because I wrote this guitar part that I really liked.” She proudly added that it’s a moment on the new album that moves away from autobiographical vulnerability towards fantasy.
“Following Eyes” nails the seductive terror of a hidden evil, conjuring a fog of suspense before a bouncy chorus clears the cobwebs away. At practice, the band takes some time to fine-tune that spine-tingling transition. When they hit that blissful groove of rumbling drums, gliding guitars, and spacey synths, the satisfaction is palpable.
They move on to “Unholy Affliction,” a heavy industrial track about the conflict between creativity, capitalism, and the unachievable pursuit of perfection. It’s a grim vision of disconnect where Allison submits to the vultures who want to turn her art into a product: “So carve me up and let the colors run.” Watching her play the song reminds me of when the topic of work came up while we were thrifting. “I don’t like doing anything related to being an artist except playing music,” she said then, and indeed, she seems most at ease strapped into her guitar.
Over the next few hours, Soccer Mommy run through every song on Sometimes, Forever except the wrenching “Still,” which Allison says she will perform solo, if at all. Near the end of rehearsal they play the other song Allison wrote at her lowest, “Darkness Forever.” It sounds exceptionally dirgy, with every bandmate adding a little oomph to their parts. Allison decides to try the piercing scream she performed on the recording, just to see if she can do it live. She takes a few steps back from the mic, pinches shut her eyes, and erupts.
