Soccer Mommy’s Sophie Allison wears dissonance like camouflage, disguising the darkest dreams with bubblegum hooks and mixing sugar-coated vocals with salt. The contradiction disguises a cry for help; sweet melodies give shelter to bitter feelings. Soccer Mommy has often used this technique to mock Allison’s vulnerabilities, but on her latest song, “Shotgun,” she welcomes the overwhelming, and often terrifying, surrender of letting herself fall in love, knowing that she probably it’s going to hurt
Allison’s ear for guitar and vocal tones remains impeccable. “Shotgun” opens with a low-key sandpaper riff that’s smooth without being soft, before tumbling off a cliff on a dizzying hook that’s more melodic than logical. his new album sometimes forever is the first produced by Oneohtrix Point Never’s Daniel Lopatin, whose mastery of multitrack sound sculpting seems to have influenced the arrangement of the first single; Allison’s tones are still distinct, but where before there was air in the mix, there is now density, clean guitars made rougher and tighter with each new layer stacked on top of the other.
There’s no telling what will happen when you hand a 20-something musician known for his bedroom recordings the keys to a fancy studio. But where some artists can find themselves a bit lost in the sauce, Allison is thriving, equipped with the tools to produce a record as bombastic as those that first fueled her nostalgic ’90s alt-rock dreams.
