By
Nicole DeMarco
Photography by
Maru Teppei

Styling by Victor Cordero. Hair by Quentin Barnette. Makeup by Ai Yokomizo. Photographer’s assistants: Jean Pierre Bonnet and Gaspar Dietrich.

SOCCER MOMMY DISCOVERS TRUTH IN VULNERABILITY


Indie rock angel Sophie Allison of Soccer Mommy opens her new album, Clean, on a distinctly melancholy note. She sings, “In the summer/You said you loved me like an animal/Stayed beside me just enough to keep your belly full.” Her raw, honest vocals hang in the air, as if waiting for a sweet embrace to calm her nerves and cure her self-doubt. It doesn’t come. “Then you took me down to the water/Got your mouth all clean,” she continues, accompanied only by her guitar. “Left me drowning/Once you picked me out your bloody teeth.” The song, “Still Clean,” is rooted in Allison’s past experience with relationships, all colored with the inescapable fear that anything could go wrong—at any moment—and she’d end up heartbroken. “That’s kind of what inspired a lot of the following songs. It’s like the prologue of this feeling,” she says, “this knot in your stomach of worry and the experience of going into a new relationship and feeling that you want to be different than you were before. You want to be good to yourself and value yourself more.”

Though she only just celebrated her twenty-first birthday while performing at Sasquatch! Music Festival in Washington, Allison’s relatable vulnerability and fearless expression make her wiser than most. After all, she’s been playing music since she was five. Born in Switzerland and raised in the heart of Nashville, she remembers writing songs on her toy guitar, including one called “What the Heck is a Cowgirl?” and playing them on the porch for her neighbors. Her dad is a scientist and her mom a teacher, but both of her siblings play music too, and her parents have been incredibly supportive of her journey. Allison frequented house shows throughout school, but, never fully feeling like she fit into her hometown’s male-dominated DIY scene, she kept her songwriting to herself. In high school, she released her first bedroom recordings on Bandcamp in 2015, as the intimately titled EP’s Songs from My Bedroom and Songs for the Recently Sad.

At the end of that summer, Allison moved to New York to pursue a degree in music business at New York University, but at the same time, her music began generating a lot of internet buzz and a growing Soccer Mommy following led to a slew of live shows. (The band name came from a supposedly uncool Twitter handle that just stuck.) Soon after, she released For Young Hearts, a compilation of earlier songs peppered with tales of messy young love, unrequited crushes, and romantic sparks that met their inevitable end, via New York-based label Orchid Tapes. “That’s kind of where it really started becoming a career,” she recalls. “That’s what really turned it into what it is now, rather than just me making music in my room.”

Sweater by Eckhaus Latta.

Just a few months later, as a sophomore, she captured the attention of indie label Fat Possum and all at once had a record deal, a touring band, and a début studio album in the works. As Allison began preparing for the record’s release and tour offers flooded in, it became clear that she didn’t need to study music business in the classroom—she was already at the heart of it. “The plan was to take time off and tour a little bit, then go back to school,” she explains, “but it just seemed like there was so much stuff that I could be doing to promote the music that I decided to take the whole year off and now I just don’t really see myself going back.” Clean came out in March to overwhelmingly positive reviews and suddenly Allison became one of the most talked about women in indie rock.

Clean was written at a time when Allison was navigating some major life changes: She’d moved to the city and suddenly felt so alone, and a budding relationship with her soon-to-be guitarist, Julian Powell, had become long distance. At the same time, she had more direction and drive than ever, with the sense that she could imagine her trajectory and actualize her dreams. Upon realizing she was about to put out another album with a label, Allison wanted to tell a story—her story. “It’s about maturing and coming to a point where you’re starting to have a career and have self-worth,” she says, “growing out of that teenage feeling of being kind of lost and coming into yourself a bit.”

The night before we speak, Allison played a show at National Sawdust in Williamsburg, supporting the legendary Liz Phair on her Exile in Guyville twenty-fifth-anniversary tour. Allison is unassuming as she shifts in her chair and adjusts her dress—to once again cover her Doc Martens—as her big brown eyes widen with excitement. “It’s crazy. She’s definitely one of the best people out there,” she says. Allison herself has often been compared to her groundbreaking predecessor for her lyrical bluntness and emo-punk ethos, perhaps best exemplified in the fiery track “Your Dog.”

It opens forcefully, with Allison singing, “I don’t wanna be your fucking dog/That you drag around,” and later, “I don’t wanna be your baby girl/That you show off to the world and/When you decide you wanna feel…I’m not a prop for you to use/When you’re lonely or confused.” She’s coming to terms with an emotionally abusive relationship and acknowledging that it’s entirely possible to still feel smitten about someone who exhibits objectifying behavior. She wants to be better. But while the song is often considered empowering and anthemic, Allison likens it to whimpering. “For me, it was really pathetic,” she explains. “I’m so tired of feeling like, No one gives a fuck about me. No one cares. It wasn’t even that empowering when I wrote it.”

All clothing by Sies Marjan.

It might seem all too common for Allison’s songwriting process to involve looking back at significant moments of her life and poignantly manifesting how she felt at the time in lyrics, as many musicians do, yet her music has an addictive quality to it. Her words are so raw and illustrative at times that it hurts. It’s maybe sad, but cathartic. It’s angsty, candid, and sincere—even contradictory. Whether it takes one play or a notable few, Soccer Mommy makes you feel something. Allison’s listeners are able to insert themselves amongst the distorted guitars and rolling bass and come face-to-face with their own faults, self-doubts, and relationship failures in order to move forward. Through her own self-discovery, Allison reminds us that it’s okay to feel vulnerable because love itself isn’t safe.

Working through the later track “Still Clean,” insecurities and fears bubble to the surface. Allison idealizes the cold-hearted “cool” girl, emotionally detached and always in control: “And she won’t ever love no boy/She’ll treat you like a fucking toy/She’ll break your heart and steal your joy, like a criminal.” Still, she knows she could never be this way. She tackles feeling anxious and insecure and being jealous of her boyfriend’s ex: “I want to be like your last girl/She’s the sun in your cold world and/I am just a dying flower/I don’t hold the summer in my eyes.”

Then “Scorpio Rising” (named for her ascending sign) is the turning point of the album and the moment of realization. “That song is like coming full circle and realizing that you can’t change the way you are and can’t pretend to not be vulnerable,” she says. “All your acting differently than you are is catching up to you.” It’s big and intense, so much so that there’s a built-in musical come down in the interlude that follows. “Scorpio Rising” is Allison’s favorite song to perform and she typically plays it last in her live shows. None of her original band members remain, but she shares the stage with Powell, Graeme Goetz (bass), Nick Brown (drums), and Gabe Wax (piano/synth).

Parts of Allison’s relationship with Powell are strung out across the record. “He knows which ones are about him because he was there too,” she says. “’Scorpio’ definitely is. ‘Wildflowers’ is, partially. ‘Last Girl’ kind of is. I feel like that’s most of them.” She pauses to reconsider. “‘Blossom’ is like half about him. ‘Flaw’ is not, ‘Skin’ is kind of. There’s a lot that have pieces of him.”

She’s thankful that Powell accompanies her on the road because otherwise, the pair would have a hard time seeing each other. Saying that her schedule is packed is an understatement. When asked what it’s like singing songs about someone who also happens to be on stage, Allison laughs and a huge smile spreads across her face. “It’s good because it ended up working well,” she says. “It’d be weird if it was songs about hating him, right?”

Clean is out now. Soccer Mommy continues on tour with Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks through August 5.




By
Nicole DeMarco
Photography by
Maru Teppei

Styling by Victor Cordero. Hair by Quentin Barnette. Makeup by Ai Yokomizo. Photographer’s assistants: Jean Pierre Bonnet and Gaspar Dietrich.

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