Soccer Mommy’s debut LP Clean follows an arc of blossoming self-realization for Sophie Allison, the songwriter, singer and guitarist at the center of the project. With a fresh pop sensibility and self-aware lyricism, the 20-year-old musician conveys her coming-of-age narrative with striking emotional depth, crafting one of the most engaging recent albums to emerge from Nashville’s DIY rock scene.
It seems natural enough that Allison, who was born in Switzerland and raised in Nashville, would pursue music as a profession. She attended Nashville School of the Arts, a speciality high school where she studied guitar and played in the swing band. As a teen, Allison followed her NSA classmates into Nashville’s circuit of punk shows at houses, DIY venues like Drkmttr and more traditional venues like The End. It’s the kind of scene where you might expect someone so thoroughly engrossed in music to feel at home, but that wasn’t the case.
“If the punk scene had been a super-inclusive one, it would’ve been fun,” Allison tells the Scene. “But it wasn’t. Every show I went to had five bands with all dudes. It made me ask, ‘Is this really all that’s here? Is this it?’ ”
Finding herself surrounded by “dudes writing about dude problems” also increased her feelings of inadequacy about the songs she was writing and recording at home on her Tascam cassette deck. “I felt like I couldn’t do it for so long,” she says. “I thought no one would want to play a show with me. ... It’s feeling as though you can’t do it because you’re not hardcore enough.”
Perceiving the gaps in the scene, Allison took some strides that helped to fill them. After graduation, she left to study music business at New York University. In the summer of 2016, during a break between terms at NYU, she mustered the confidence to start booking shows under the name Soccer Mommy, which she’d been using to release music on Bandcamp. Her unabashed lyrics and nimble guitar-driven sound quickly began to draw fans, and she packed out DIY spots with a crowd that was noticeably more inclusive than those she’d been a part of before, discovering a hidden gang of female lo-fi fans.
That August, Soccer Mommy opened for Brooklyn indie goddess Frankie Cosmos at The End in front of a sold-out crowd. Allison remembers the show as a reckoning moment. “There were so many younger girls there I’d never seen at any local shows,” she says. “It reminded me that there are people who like DIY music who don’t just fit into the punk thing. Seeing that many people interested made me realize a scene could emerge in this direction.”
Encouraged by her success that summer, Allison returned to NYU, playing area clubs and scoring national attention for her short-form releases. Suddenly signed with an agent and fielding offers from labels, she found herself spending more time on business emails than on actual coursework. She opted not to return to school in fall of 2017, and began to tour more intensely between visits to the studio to work on her full-length debut Clean, which she’ll release via Fat Possum on Friday.
Allison found that the challenges of living and working in New York “matched her ambitions,” and allowed her space to process her life experiences. From this bout of self-reflection came the songs on Clean, a psycho-emotional concept album she describes as “cohesively encompassing a whole growth period” of identity shifts and formative relationships.
The album begins with the slow-burning “Still Clean.” Over spare guitar chords that sit far in the background, Allison opens up in her honeyed voice about a deep sense of longing for a time before she experienced heartbreak. She’s upfront about the tension between the way she perceives herself to be and the way she’d like to be, and she sees her own willingness to bend to others’ ideals as unsettling.
On the danceable “Cool,” Allison describes a no-frills, badass cool girl, who revels in a lifestyle uncluttered by emotional attachment, as an example of what she might do with her desire to be someone else. In the single “Your Dog,” Allison declares her own independence, crooning cooly, “I don’t want to be your baby girl / That you show off to the world.”
But the joys of her self-defined freedom don’t last long. In “Flaw,” Allison is unable to reconcile the ideal she’s striving to achieve with her true identity. The struggle to make peace with herself carries on until “Scorpio Rising,” the luminous power ballad that is the record’s emotional centerpiece. An anthemic wall of sound rises up behind her as she comes to terms with the idea that “trying to be different won’t make you different” — that it’s better to accept yourself as you are, flaws and all.
Allison might complete her degree someday, but it’s not her priority. It seems she now has the confidence to express herself openly and honestly, in a way that resonates with fans.
“I already have a job,” she says. “Why would I go back to school and put my life on pause to study what I’m doing in the real world?”
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