Posts Tagged ‘Sophie Allison’

SOCCER MOMMY – ” Cool “

Posted: March 27, 2018 in CLASSIC ALBUMS, MUSIC
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Soccer Mommy

Just over two years ago, Sophie Allison was writing melodic bedroom rock ahead of a move from her native Nashville to New York to study music business at NYU. During that time, she started to find a burgeoning fanbase on Bandcamp for her wistful demos under the name Soccer Mommy, which chronicled the harsh realities of the teenage experience. During her tenure at NYU, she began playing live shows around Brooklyn, building a presence in the DIY scene, and it wasn’t long until she caught the ears of Fat Possum (the influential independent label who’ve released records by Wavves, Youth Lagoon, and Lissie) and her life changed.

Still aged just 20, Allison is reeling from her rise to indie-rock stardom. On her recently released debut album Clean, she self-reflects, translating the loneliness and crushing disappointment that comes with being a teenager into intimate musings – a confessional sound that similarly launched the careers of Mitski and Julien Baker. However, age aside, Allison believes her music is universally relatable. “I think it resonates with people because it’s about struggling to be open, honest and take risks: struggling with your own identity,” she explains. “Everybody feels that at some point in their lives.”

Take for example her latest single “Cool”, a raucous track where Allison lilts about what it means to be the “cool girl.” Despite its initial appeal, her pursuit of the “cool girl” trope ends up creating her own unhappiness. Instead, she finds more solace in being herself. In Allison’s video for the track, premiering below, she explores “the depth beyond the image of coolness.” Playing with the idea of cool, Allison blossoms into different versions of herself, all the while interspersed with animated ice cream sandwiches, pot leaves, and crayons. She becomes one of the guys, clad in aviators and a leather jacket; a rocker who flaunts fuschia wing-tip eyeliner and a Hot Topic necklace; and a heartbreaker who chops off the hair of a Ken doll, ultimately revealing that “cool” doesn’t mean just one thing.

Taken from the debut, Clean, available on Fat Possum Records

SOCCER MOMMY – ” Clean “

Posted: March 10, 2018 in CLASSIC ALBUMS, MUSIC
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Soccer mommy

“I was wasting all my time on someone who didn’t know me,” Sophie Allison sings in the first verse of “Blossom (Wasting All My Time).” It’s the kind of thing you can’t remember if you realized in hindsight, or a part of you knew it all along—the subtle production and the warm strums of the acoustic guitar allowing your mind to drift. “Scorpio Rising” starts out sounding like an updated version of Big Star’s “Thirteen,” before taking a sudden turn when Allison’s young Romeo changes his mind and goes for a girl that In “Flaw,” the end is her fault, though she doesn’t want to believe it. “I choose to blame it all on you/’Cause I don’t like the truth,” she sings, her clear and unpolished voice fittingly going slightly flat.

Clean is the Debut album proper from Nashville based 20 year old Sophie Allison who records under the name Soccer Mommy. Following on from the critically acclaimed Collection, released in August. Clean was recorded by Gabe Wax (Deerhunter, War on Drugs, Beirut) in NYC and mixed by Ali Chant (PJ Harvey, Perfume Genius, Aldous Harding). The album is a big step up production wise, and it’s the most grown up Allison has sounded to date. For fans of Liz Phair, Frankie Cosmos, Angel Olsen and Julia Jacklin.

Taken from the album, Clean, available on Fat Possum Records

SOCCER MOMMY – ” Clean ” Best Albums Of 2018

Posted: March 2, 2018 in CLASSIC ALBUMS, MUSIC
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Following on from last years compilation “Collection”, Nashville based Sophie Allison aka Soccer Mommy now brings us her debut album proper. Produced by Gabe Wax (Deerhunter, War On Drugs, Beirut), the new album is a huge step up from her earlier bedroom recordings. The fuller sound works perfectly with Sophie’s finely crafted, bitter-sweet pop songs that have a world weary quality beyond her 20 years. Whole record is stellar, new version of Last Girl makes me really happy. A contender for the best record so far in 2018,

Twenty-year-old Sophie Allison, cuts to the core on Soccer Mommy’s Clean, as if she’s already in hurry. Her flat delivery and lack of lyrical pretense lay bare moments of obsession and rejection in a frank, almost detached fashion. Her album takes its title from Taylor Swift’s freedom ballad, but there’s also a sense of the world-burning defiance borrowed from Liz Phair’s ’90s debut. “I don’t want to be your f****** dog,” she snarls in answer to decades of obliviousness. Clean betrays simmering anger, hurt and an ever-present humor and self-deprecation (not surprising for someone with a moniker this silly). The emotions are felt, but Allison revels in none of them. As if to say there’s a lot of life yet to live, she keeps a sense of the absurdity of it all. “She’ll steal your joy like a criminal,” Allison sings in admiration. “I wanna be that cool.”

We love the delicate-yet-fearless vibe of Soccer Mommy’s new songs “Cool,” “Still Clean,” and “Your Dog,” the latter of which she performed for us live in the Paste studio last month. The young Nashville songwriter’s debut full-length, Clean, finally drops today.

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Released March 2nd, 2018
Sophie Allison – Guitar, vocals, bass
Julian Powell – Lead guitar
Nick Brown – Drums
Gabe Wax – Piano, synth, mellotron, bass, guitar, drum programming, percussion

SOCCER MOMMY – ” Still Clean “

Posted: February 13, 2018 in MUSIC
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There’s something beautifully fragile about the latest track from Nashville native Sophie Allison, AKA Soccer Mommy. It’s also the newest release of Allison’s upcoming LP Clean, and with it comes the foreshadowing of something truly spellbinding to come.

The latest efforts from Allison have suggested an evolution of musical style. With the harder-hitting ‘Cool’ and ‘Dog’ Soccer Mommy looked to be adding a little grit in to her work. ‘Still Clean’ however is a return to her roots.

Genteel and utterly vulnerable the emotive expression of clean, and all the innocence, susceptibility and youthful connotations it has is plucked and pranged with every string.

“‘Still Clean’ discusses the hopelessness of waiting for someone who’s abandoned you,” explains Allison. “It uses this idea of being ‘clean’ to explain the feeling of being stuck waiting for someone, hoping that they haven’t moved on from you. When you are stuck in this place of waiting you kind of put your world – and you memory of them – on pause. But as the song shows, sometimes people keep moving while you’re standing still, and sometimes you’re the only one who’s left clean.”

The new album, Clean, will be out on March 2nd via Fat Possum, and with every new release it cements it’s inclusion on all the end of year lists, and we’re only in February.

SOCCER MOMMY – ” Cool “

Posted: February 4, 2018 in CLASSIC ALBUMS, MUSIC
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Soccer Mommy is 2018’s chillest new rock star

Sophie Allison, is the 20-year-old songwriter who releases lo-fi love songs as Soccer Mommy. Sophie has giant brown eyes, today made up impeccably with bright lavender eyeshadow. Her stick-straight brown hair hangs evenly over a hooded sweatshirt with a heavy-metal-style logo, which she stole from her younger brother, who she just remembered is turning 18 in two days. It’s the tail end of 2017 and we’re at The Bean, a coffee shop near New York University, the school from which she is currently on leave. “Now I don’t wanna go back to school at all,” she says when I ask about her decision to take the year off to tour and make music. “School is so not fun in comparison.”

Clean

Sophie has known she wanted to make music since age 6, when she first picked up a guitar. But it wasn’t until several years later, after climbing over a hump of insecurity, that she actually started doing it. In high school she dated a boy in a punk band and hung around the “outskirts” of the Nashville rock scene — but she was nervous to tell anyone she wanted to be a musician herself. “I thought it would be weird for me to say that, out of the blue,” she remembers. “It felt like it would be too big of a deal.” With a little bit of distance, Sophie realizes that her youthful insecurity stemmed, at least partly, from the way the scene operated like a boys’ club: “It was the little things — not being asked to jam, or not being considered for this new band,” she remembers. “Sometimes you have to say, ‘Hey, I’m here and I do this. Check my shit out.’”

The summer before she left for college, Sophie started uploading her own misty and faraway-sounding guitar songs to the internet. Sophie’s compositions are hinged on the kind of angsty, melodic directness. In 2016, Sophie’s album For Young Hearts was released on cassette by Orchid Tapes, the little label behind early projects from other home-recording artists like Ricky Eat Acid, Yohuna, and (Sandy) Alex G. And last year she assembled Collection, an album-length compendium of new songs and re-recorded old ones, something like an understated primer to Soccer Mommy’s bedroom-rock universe.

This March, Sophie will release Clean, a new Soccer Mommy full-length that she says is about yearning to change yourself but ultimately realizing that’s not really how the cookie crumbles. On “Cool,” a power-pop stand-out with a wiggling hook that reminds me of “Teenage Dirtbag,” Sophie admires the moxie of a stoner girl who’ll “break you down and eat you whole.” There’s also a Liz Phair-esque unrequited-love song called “Skin” that nails the experience of irrationally trying to get to know someone’s insides before you’ve come to terms with your own: “I’m clawing at your skin trying to see your bones … I’m just a puzzle piece trying to fit just right.”

And then there’s “Scorpio Rising,” the record’s slow-building centerpiece. “You’re made from the stars / That we watched from your car,” Sophie sings, her voice crescendoing in tandem with her radiant guitars. “I’m just a victim of changing planets / A Scorpio rising and my parents.” It’s a perfect shout-along lyric, one that feels both timeless and extremely of-the-moment. Sophie calls it the most personal track on the record, and I say that makes it the wisest.

Taken from Soccer Mommy’s upcoming debut ‘Clean’, out March 2nd on Fat Possum Records

SOCCER MOMMY – ” Death By Chocolate “

Posted: January 11, 2018 in MUSIC
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Still in her teens at the time, Nashville singer-songwriter Sophie Allison and her indie rock project Soccer Mommy turned some heads in 2016 with her cassette-only release of For Young Hearts, 8 tracks of minimal bedroom pop budding with melancholy chord progressions and refreshingly frank lyrical accompaniment.  It was enough to catch Fat Possum’s attention, signing her in 2017 for a collective album . Fans of Waxahatchee, Julien Baker and Phoebe Bridgers will dig this one for sure.

Soccer Mommy – Songs from my bedroom

SOCCER MOMMY – ” Your Dog “

Posted: January 9, 2018 in CLASSIC ALBUMS, MUSIC
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Soccer Mommy is the stage name of Nashville native, 20 year-old Sophie Allison, and today as well as sharing her brand new track ‘Your Dog’ she’s also announced her new album Clean will be out on 2nd March.

We’ve featured Soccer Mommy for a while now and her ability to make relatable and challenging music that hinges on the melodrama of normality has made her one of our ‘ones to watch’ for 2018.

It seems we were right to be keeping an eye on her output as she’s given us a belter of a new track. ‘Your Dog’ has one key line that boils with tension and underlying fury, it’s this “I don’t want to be your fucking dog,” and it sets the tone for the whole track.

The song menaces and meanders across emotions, Allison says “The song comes from a feeling of being paralyzed in a relationship to the point where you feel like you are a pawn in someone else’s world. The song and the video are meant to show someone breaking away and taking action, but at the same time, it’s only a quick burst of motivation. It’s a moment of strength amidst a long period of weakness.”

Speaking of her first full length proper Allison said “I’d never made a full album before, just EPs and random tracks thrown together. I wanted it to be a lot more cohesive than the rest of the stuff that came before,” explains Allison. “I wanted to make something that was a full piece of my life, that addressed similar themes and held together as a whole.”

Sophie Allison – Guitar, vocals, bass
Julian Powell – Lead guitar
Nick Brown – Drums
Gabe Wax – Piano, synth, mellotron, bass, guitar, drum programming, percussion

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The result is Clean, an album that presents Soccer Mommy as a singular artist, wise beyond her years, with an emotional authenticity of her own. Clean will be released on March 2nd via Fat Possum  She’s also due out on a UK tour in the Spring, the dates of which are below.

But for now, take a moment to enjoy ‘Your Dog’

March
2nd – London, UK – Rough Trade East
3rd – Leeds, UK – Headrow House
4th – Manchester UK, The Castle Hotel
6th – London, UK – Moth Club
7th – Brighton, UK – The Hope

SOCCER MOMMY – ” Collection ” Best Albums of 2017

Posted: August 7, 2017 in CLASSIC ALBUMS, MUSIC
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It’s been less than two years since Sophie Allison started making songs as Soccer Mommy, but in that short period of time everything she’s put out has been consistently rewarding and uniformly excellent. It’s hard to write the kind of music that she does with such skill — her songs are unassuming and simple on the surface, but deceptively complex. Allison’s voice is muted and empathetic, living within the songs rather than overpowering them, and her guitar work is subtle but intoxicating. Everything she writes has the same gauzy sheen, and they could scan as boring if they weren’t held down by Allison’s arresting personal narratives and enough intricate sonic framework to support many repeated listens.

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She arrived pretty fully-realized, with a series of EPs with charmingly plain-spoken titles like “Songs From The Recently Sad” and “Songs From My Bedroom”. They felt intimate and universal, like she was expressing a communal grief over adolescent lost loves, told from the perspective of someone who only has nostalgia for the recent past. Allison was 18 when she recorded those songs ,putting them online as she made the transition from growing up in Nashville to moving to New York City for school but they felt like they were written by someone far more worn-out by life, or rather they encapsulated the youthful sort of jadedness

Earlier this year, she put out vinyl 7″with two excellent tracks, “Last Girl” and “Be Seeing You.” It was her first release that featured the full band she had put together to play her shows, and it became clear that Soccer Mommy songs could be much more muscular and peppy than they initially appeared.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3yOZCm-gbM

Her new video for “Inside Out,” a song that originally appeared on For Young Hearts, shows Allison at the crossroads between her full band (presented here in monster masks) and the project’s solo beginnings.

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Taken from the upcoming album ‘Collection’, Out August 4th on Fat Possum Records.

SOCCER MOMMY – ” Collection “

Posted: June 28, 2017 in MUSIC
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Comprising of reworked versions of some of her best Bandcamp releases, as well as a few new songs written, mixed and produced by Sophie herself, “Collection” is the perfect introduction to Soccer Mommy’s sound: quietly catchy, surprisingly confrontational, the kind of music that sneaks up on you and makes a permanent first impression. There are two brand-new tracks included on Soccer Mommy’s upcoming “Collection”, whose main intention is to re-record some of Sophie Allison’s older cuts with a full band behind her. The first of those new songs, “Out Worn” demonstrated how powerful that can be, but the second, “Allison,” is a plea for self-possession and vulnerability: “Allison, put down your sword,” she addresses herself. “Give up what you’re fighting for ’cause he’s been waiting at the shore/ His feet are in the water, he’s waiting for an answer of your boat in the water/ But you’re not on the sea.” It’s a reminder to not keep your emotions bottled up when you have a fantasy, share it; when you want to tell someone you love them, do it. “Allison” takes that waiting period between when you have a thought and when you finally verbalize it and makes it sound as beautifully sad and wanting and unsure as it actually feels

Soccer Mommy – “Allison”
Taken from the upcoming mini-album, Collection, out August 4th on Fat Possum Records

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all songs by Sophie Allison
guitar and vocals by Sophie Allison
recorded and engineered by Jacob Corenflos
drums and backing vocals by Thomas Borrelli
lead guitar by Kelton Young
bass by Jacob Corenflos
synth on “Out Worn” by Casey Weissbuch

SOCCER MOMMY – ” Out Worn “

Posted: May 17, 2017 in MUSIC
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Photos by Stasia de Tilly

Soccer Mommy has built a reputation as an incredibly exciting DIY artist, recording her own songs and releasing them for free on Bandcamp over the last few years. It’s a reputation that caught the attention of Fat Possum Records, who will be releasing a mini-album Collection on the 4th August.

Comprised of reworked versions of some of her best Bandcamp releases, as well as a few new songs written, mixed and produced by aka Sophie Allison herself, Collection is the perfect introduction to Soccer Mommy’s sound: quietly catchy, surprisingly confrontational, the kind of music that sneaks up on you and makes a permanent first impression. Lead track ‘Out Worn’ is a fine showcase of how Allison spins indie tropes upside down. Open, jangly chords simmer in the foreground, while she astutely relates the tale of a relationship hitting breaking point: “My make up stains over your white tees, bite my nails til’ my fingers bleed,” she sings. There’s a deadly edge to her wordplay, a skill in every line she pens. It might sound simple on the surface, but there’s the sign of a seriously skilled songwriter in there
“You can’t say indie rock is dead,” says Sophie. “It’s just being taken over by women.” That’s the claim of Sophie Allison, whose understated, finitely-arranged guitar pop as Soccer Mommy certainly backs up her case.

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The songs on Collection portray an artist fully-formed, mature far beyond her age. Sophie sings of toxic relationships, infatuations, and all the experiences of being a teenage girl. There’s a freedom and a joy to this music, and Collection stands as an excellent introduction to a powerful new voice.

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