Emotional, aesthetic, introspective
With summer beginning to heat up, it’s the perfect time to give some love to indie artist Soccer Mommy’s most recent album, Sometimes, Forever. Nearing its one-year anniversary, the album is just as rich and emotional as it was at its release, playing with a range of styles but never abandoning its traditional indie roots.
Soccer Mommy is the stage name of singer and guitarist Sophia Allison, a Nashville-based 26 year old indie artist who’s found success with her previous albums Color Theory and Clean, featuring songs that have racked up tens of millions of streams on various platforms. Stylistically, Allison’s work has been very classic indie rock, propelled by sweet vocals, summery guitar and personal lyrics about navigating relationships and mental health. Her songs tend to be fairly slow-paced, but the strong instrumentals and charming melody lines ensure that they’re never boring.
Sometimes, Forever continues this trend and does so well – songs like “Bones” feature a delicious combination of distortion and echoey indie guitar, confessional lyrics sparkling with skillfully placed metaphors. Songs like “Bones”, as well as “Don’t Ask Me” and the escapist “Feel It All The Time” are good listens, maintaining the wistful, nostalgic feeling of Allison’s earlier work. However, there’s no clear standout among these songs, nothing as catchy or stylistically similar as tracks off previous albums such as “Your Dog” or “Circle The Drain.” What sets Sometimes, Forever apart isn’t its hits, but its experimentation.
Sometimes, Forever leans further into shoegaze than Allison’s more straightforward previous work, a style that’s suited to the softness of her vocals. The gentler instrumentation of “newdemo” and the stripped down “Fire In The Driveway” can feel a little twee at times, but abstract lyricism give these slower songs a cutting, almost eerie poignance. Likewise, the album experiments with a darker, industrial-influenced sound, featuring electronic pulsing at the beginning of “With U” and a mechanical, skittery beat in “Unholy Affliction” that reflects the lyrical themes of loss of identity and the feeling that you’ve become a part of the machine. The heavy bass and drum machine backing “Darkness Forever” could almost be a slowed down rap track, interrupted only by the grinding gear of a guitar riff that leads the song out.
At times, Allison pairs gritty verses with catchy, melodic choruses, such as in “Shotgun” and the delightfully creepy “Following Eyes.” At other times, she strips down to almost entirely acoustic instrumentation, such as in “Still,” a touchingly intimate final track which borrows melody lines from the opening track “Bones” and pulls the album to a satisfying close.
Sometimes, Forever is a deeply emotional album, and Allison is an expert at tailoring the sound of her music to match the feeling behind it, whether grinding out a bleaker industrial sound or stretching into wistful, sunset-colored shoegaze tracks. Despite its experimentation, the album’s emotional core gives it a cohesive feeling, cycling through a personal story of heartbreak, anxiety and the ways that beauty persists through it all. While perhaps less catchy than previous work, Sometimes, Forever excels at each style it incorporates, and is sure to please any fans of newer indie rock.
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