It’s autumn in Nashville, but Sophie Allison, aka Soccer Mommy, already has a little bit of winter in her soul. She is dialling in over Zoom to discuss her fourth album, Evergreen, a stirringly raw collection of confessional indie rock – and a record informed by a recent loss in her personal life.
“It is a lot about loss and grappling with that – your own perspective on loss and seeing how it changes so much from day to day,” the 27-year-old says. There are times when you “feel like you can’t go on or [feel] like it’s all-encompassing and it’s all you can think about”. At other moments, however, “you’re realising ... it’s not all there is. There’s more. You can cling to beautiful things about it as well.” She shrugs. “So it’s kind of moving through that, trying to find a place to call the end. But there never is one.”
Amid peals of fuzzy postpunk guitar, songs such as Lost and Changes are frank about the pain she has gone through. (“Everything will fade to memory in time,” she protests on the latter.) The LP doesn’t delve into specifics, despite the often unflinching lyrics. But this isn’t her first time grappling with trauma. Soccer Mommy’s 2020 album, Color Theory, was about coming to terms with her mother’s long-term struggle with cancer. Taken together, the two records are a searing yet very human meditation on grief and the process of re-engaging with life after it picks you up and shakes you until you don’t know whether to cry or scream.
“I had so many ideas of what I thought I was going to be feeling,” Allison says, thoughtful and upbeat as she recovers from a promotional flight to London that coincided with a bout of illness. “At times you’re trying to push yourself to feel certain things because you think that’s what you’re supposed to be feeling. You have no idea what you are going to feel from one day to the next, and what is going to stick with you, and what isn’t going to stick with you.”
Allison has come a long way in a relatively brief career. A short seven years ago the singer from the Nashville suburbs was studying at New York University when her grungy song Your Dog went viral. (Pitchfork heralded it as an “emboldened anthem” with “charming, twisted guitar riffs”.) Six months later she was on the road with the Paramore, the emo mega group (and fellow Nashville act), as support on an arena tour. This was a huge adjustment, and she remembers those early days as challenging. She recalls being ambitious and also a little wet behind the ears and having to grow up quickly.
“I left school” – which is to say college – “in 2017 to start touring. I was basically singing as much as I could and taking any tour I could, as long as I could afford to be able to do it,” she says. “And it was very hard. It was a gruelling year that at times felt insane – it felt crazy that I was doing it. It was obviously worth it. If you put the time in you get a lot in return. This industry can ask a lot of you. Sometimes too much. If you are working for something it can work out.”
Born in 1997, Allison grew up listening to her dad’s Who and Springsteen records. She was never into boy bands and missed One Direction mania by several years: she was a young teenager discovering alt.rock when they came along. But she appreciated their music for what it was and was shocked to hear of the death of Liam Payne, a tragedy that has prompted debate about whether the music business has a duty of care to young artists. (Payne was 16 at the start of 1D.)
“The whole thing with him is really sad. For someone to have some of these things happen, it makes people reflect a lot on how the industry works. The kind of things it can do. It is a world where that kind of stuff happens a lot. It’s very hard on people’s mental health.”
Going on the road as a young artist is psychologically and physically draining, she says. “That first year I was touring, it was exciting. It was thrilling. It was also like a living hell.”
She was getting by on a shoestring – driving to gigs and living out of fast-food restaurants. “We were travelling in my car – in my Subaru Outback. Four people scrunched up in that with, like, all of our gear.”
“You have no money – no money at all. So you’re eating fast food, and you’re not getting [enough sleep]. It’s enough to break anyone. It’s very important to try to [live] healthy when you can. That’s the thing when you’re at that level ... You’re trying to eat well, to get some sleep. Some people drink heavily, try to do drugs. I can’t even imagine trying to do that now.
“Even when I was younger I would drink on tour – I wasn’t getting crazy drunk, because we had to leave [for the next show] in, like, seven hours. It’s too much. People can do it and feel comfortable, but I think when you’re doing it all the time it’d be the same thing as going out and getting drunk every night. It’s just crazy.”
Allison was born in Zurich, where her neuroscientist father worked as a researcher. The family moved to Tennessee when she was a toddler, and she attended Nashville School of the Arts, whose alumni also include the Stranger Things star Natalia Dyer. She posted her first songs to Bandcamp in 2015, as “Soccer Mommy” – a semi-random riff on the concept of the suburban soccer mom, which she had used as her Twitter handle.
Nashville is a strange town to grow up in if you want to become a musician. It’s the capital of American country music, home of the famous Music Mile, with its hallowed venues and recording studios. But that heritage can feel all-pervading, especially if you’re a kid with a guitar who wants something to rebel against.
Nashville is touristy, she says, “but it is part of the [environment] here too. When I was younger, growing up, it wasn’t something I was into.” The city’s musical heritage is everywhere. “I went to a performing-arts high school, and we’d have country artists come in, talk to us and do stuff. It is a big part of the city, country music and Americana. There’s a lot of other music going on, too. In high school there was a lot of garage rock and psych rock kind of happening. And there was some hip-hop. There’s plenty of stuff going on outside of the country world. It’s still a huge part of Nashville.”
Nashville is also part of the story of Taylor Swift, who moved to the city in her early teens to pursue her recording career. Allison is a fan – and feels privileged to have watched a woman playing a guitar become the most powerful person in the music industry.
“For me and for a lot of other people that were my age, when she started putting out her albums, it was amazing to see a girl with a guitar writing about her feelings. That was such a different thing. You could really feel the person [in the songs]. That’s why it became so popular. That was really important for a lot of young girls who wanted to make music, wanted to write songs, to be able to see that.”
Allison has a big 12 months ahead: her new record is to be followed in 2025 by a tour that will include her biggest solo Irish show, at Vicar Street in Dublin. Touring is still a challenge, but she’s a little older and a lot wiser.
“It’s crazy now, because I’ve been doing it for so many years. It all feels normal now. But it’s also living the dream, even if there are harder parts of it and annoying things that you didn’t know were going to be part of your world. It’s an opportunity that not everyone gets.” It’s also an opportunity she has made the most of. Evergreen is her best album yet, a rumination on loss that is full of life.
Evergreen is released by Loma Vista. Soccer Mommy plays Vicar Street, Dublin, on May 11th, 2025
