Right now, the band Soccer Mommy has just reached a point where its members can actually now call it a career. Like many of her contemporaries, what began in 2015 as a Bandcamp barrage of songwriter Sophie Allison’s home recordings has now morphed into a four-piece band — one that’s signed to Fat Possum Records, just played shows in Europe and gets coverage in Pitchfork, Stereogum and The Fader.
The latest release, Collection — a set of re-worked old songs mixed in with a couple of new ones — dropped earlier this month and is the most fully realized Soccer Mommy release yet. It’s also the record Allison was most nervous about, as she’s become aware of her music’s reach now.
“I definitely get very nervous whenever something’s coming out in the future,” she tells City Paper. “I think that makes it more fun, just knowing it’s a bigger scale. If it’s scary, it usually turns out pretty good.”
However, Allison says that her vulnerable songwriting style — that she describes as “chill but kinda sad” — won’t take a hit with the size of her audience increasing. If anything, it’ll empower her to be even more open with her lyrics.
“It’s much harder to be vulnerable to people who know you than to people who don’t know you,” she says. “It’s easier [now] then when I was posting it on my Tumblr, and it was mostly people who knew me … hearing it.”
Allison says that the next batch of songs will take a grander, more powerful form, which is something the band hinted it could do successfully with Collection’s standout cuts, “Out Worn” and “Inside Out.” In addition to being the longest tracks on the record, these two contain the deepest grooves, the most gratifying builds, and the strongest riffs and keyboard hooks.
“That’s definitely how I expect myself sounding,” she says, referring to how the band has been performing most of the songs live recently. “Big and full, and sometimes it’s hard to capture that fullness and intensity in my bedroom or a home studio. It’s definitely much more fun to play them live and hear that largeness that I imagine.”
