Album Review: Evergreen by Soccer Mommy

Where Soccer Mommy's previous album Sometimes, Forever was up in space with its ethereality, Evergreen is firmly set on Earth. Written after Sophie Allison suffered a great personal loss, her fourth album is a tender reflection on continuing to live with a broken heart. Evergreen is raw and real - a still-frame photograph of someone at the forefront of personal turmoil.

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The idea is to distinguish between the stimulus and your own conception of it. Of course, there's a gray area here (can we ever be fully objective?), but the exercise highlights our tendency to channel what we perceive through familiar narratives and associations, reinforcing our biases rather than having fresh experiences. Sophia Allison, a.k.a. Soccer Mommy, seems to have embraced the spirit of this process with her new album, Evergreen.

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Sophie Allison's latest studio album, Evergreen, focuses on themes of loss, memory, and regret. Working in a narrower, but lush, palette, songs are colored with swells of strings and flute that convey a dreamy feel and sentimental tug. In their own way, the opening two songs, "Lost" and "M," wrestle with mourning. Snippets like "I've got her name," and "I've got her picture in a frame," which are gently propelled by an understated acoustic guitar riff, make "Lost" the album's most direct rumination.

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Now comes Evergreen, another fine album, albeit less exciting and distinctive. It's certainly her most accessible work yet, but that compliment almost always comes with compromises, and Evergreen is no different. The songwriting is still excellent, and Allison's voice never been higher in the mix, but there are fewer surprises here overall, even with one obvious addition to her sound.

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Sophie Allison, who records under the moniker Soccer Mommy, rose to prominence during a fortuitous time; however, depending upon how one looks at things, the timing of that ascent might have stymied her individuality. Her visibility immediately followed that of--or coincided with--Julien Baker, Lucy Dacus, Hand Habits, Snail Mail, Phoebe Bridgers, and Tomberlin, amongst others. Those introspective songwriters, with soft vocals concealing big hearts, became the indie rock equivalent of a Lilith Fair movement, so much so that Baker, Bridgers, and Dacus eventually formed the now-acclaimed supergroup Boygenius.

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Nostalgia holds profound space in Sophie Allison's music, but on her fourth album, 'Evergreen' , she rejects its over-romanticisation; the title track closing the record leads with "I don't wanna be let down / By another perfect memory." 'Evergreen' is delicate, considered, and an emblem of life's freights and grooves. It epitomises a feeling of autumn, of chilling change and transitions. With a rich string chorus that runs through the final track and the songs preceding it, Soccer Mommy has created a dream-filled escape that always falls back to the present.

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Grief is a difficult feeling to reckon with. But on her fourth album, Sophie Allison - aka Soccer Mommy - does exactly that: from accepting time's slow destruction ('Changes') to feeling stuck in the past ('Thinking of You'), each track on 'Evergreen' is hauntingly beautiful. While Sophie has always been an acclaimed songwriter, here she harnesses the power of her talents and hits home with uncomfortably relatable lines like "I don't want to be let down / By another perfect memory" ('Evergreen') and "And I can feel the memory tainted / By the way I've changed" ('Dreaming of Falling').

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