Soccer Mommy: Sometimes, Forever review – warm, toothsome pop with icy blasts of angst

Sophie Allison’s impressive follow-up to Color Theory sets emotional gridlock, the supernatural and apocalyptic despair to sweet melody and cold gusts of noise

‘I feel the bones of how we used to be,” sings Sophie Allison on her third album as Soccer Mommy. It’s not a reference to her creative process – it’s the opening line of a song about a failing relationship – but it does feel oddly apropos the music she makes. At 25, Allison is more of an indie traditionalist than most of her US alt-rock peers. Her sound comes unsullied by persions into glossy 80s synth-pop, faux R&B or knowing pastiches of 70s singer-songwriter soft rock. It has thus far stuck to a template rooted in the early 90s: lazily strummed electric guitar, honeyed vocals and, occasionally, the swirling, echoey atmospherics of shoegazing, sounds that are all present and correct on Sometimes, Forever.

She is good at it, too, as evidenced by the roaring finale of Bones or Shotgun’s gauzy textures. The songs are driven by Allison’s knack for pretty melodies: you can hear her influences, but this isn’t a historical re-enactment. Similarly, her lyrics update some common early 90s themes for a pricklier era. A grungy disdain for corporate music industry machinations – which finds its voice on Unholy Affliction, a track that depicts Allison “tired of the money and all of the talking at me” – is spiked with swipes at toxic fan culture in a world of “busy wires” spreading gossip and opinion “like fire”: “I read the things people have to say – they make me feel I’m not a person,” she sings.

Elsewhere, the twentysomething ennui that underpinned the generation X era – “I’m just 22 going on 23, already worn out from everything,” she sings on Feel It All the Time – is now a source of angst and anxiety rather than the slacker’s stoned what’s-the-point shrug: “I don’t know how to feel things small, it’s a tidal wave or nothing at all,” as she puts it on Still, a song that ends with its protagonist self-harming. The old shoegazing trope of blissful surrender to a nameless-but-overwhelming erotic or chemical experience is reworked as something bleaker. “My will is gone and I don’t feel a thing” is the kind of line you can imagine being sighed over a wall of effects-heavy guitar 30 years ago. Here, on Don’t Ask Me, it’s not about submitting to hedonism, but to crippling emotional stasis. “I was swallowed in the night, I felt drawn in like a moth to a flame,” she sings on Following Eyes. It’s unclear whether the ensuing saga of summoning up “an apparition… like no horror I had seen” is meant to be metaphorical or a description of dabblings in the occult, but either way, it doesn’t end well: “A million spiders on my skin, a kind of haunting that’s gripped me ever since.”

Soccer Mommy: Bones – video

Enlisting producer Daniel Lopatin – better known as electronic auteur Oneohtrix Point Never, and fresh from working on the Weeknd’s Dawn FM – proves to be Sometimes, Forever’s smartest move. His contributions shift the album’s sound from the warm familiarity of its predecessor, 2020’s Color Theory, into less recognisable terrain. Employed with the goal of getting “really weird with the atmosphere”, he fulfils the brief: Sometimes, Forever is at its most engaging when Lopatin’s sound designs appear to be working in sympathy with the grimmer aspects of the lyrics and at odds with Allison’s penchant for a toothsome pop melody. Before the guitars arrive on Darkness Forever, her voice is set to cold gusts of noise and a breakbeat that heaves rather than rolls along. Sickly sounding tones support Following Eyes’ metaphorical-or-otherwise tale of the supernatural. Newdemo starts off traditionally enough – vocals and shimmering guitar – but every inch of space in the track gradually fills with warping electronics that occasionally threaten to crowd everything else out. For a song with a sweet tune, the result is remarkably claustrophobic. It fits with the apocalyptic tone of what Allison has to say – “the rain will pound us down, and before we know, the world will drown” – without compromising her melodic vision.

It’s all less striking when Lopatin’s input is less obvious, although Allison is a skilled writer and her songs still have a habit of worming their way into your head, as on the opening salvo of Bones and With U, which depict a toxic relationship. But Sometimes, Forever feels like a songwriter beginning to spread her wings, displaying a willingness to take her music in fresh directions. “I don’t know how I’ll feel tonight,” Allison sings as the album draws to a close, “might make an impulsive decision”. Again, it’s not a reference to her creative process, but it fits the unexpected quality of Sometimes, Forever at its best: artistically at least, you hope she continues to make impulsive decisions.

This week Alexis listened to

Waleed – Se Rompen
Reissued a year after attracting the attention of Four Tet, Floating Points and Daphni, a beautiful euphoric/melancholy fusion of cut-up vocals, soft electronics and two-step beats.