Singer-songwriter’s fourth album is her most personal to date
On “M,” a jangly, spacious solitary-feeling song from her fourth album as Soccer Mommy, indie rock singer-songwriter Sophie Allison drops a line that’s at once heartbreaking, haunting, and courageous: “I don’t mind talking to empty halls.” Allison has been making records since she was an ambitious Nashville teen putting songs up on the internet. Every album she’s done has its own shape and feel — from her prodigious 2018 breakthrough, Clean, to her 2020 meditation on broken nostalgia, Color Theory, to 2022’s darker, more noisily cathartic Sometimes, Forever. Her latest, Evergreen, is her most unguarded and personal.
On the gray cover, she’s alone in a field, seeming to contemplate the vast emptiness in front of her. The music has a similar feel. The single “Driver” is probably the best rocker she’s ever recorded, but most of the album has a sadly reflective, dream-pop haziness, steeped in Smiths jangle, echo, and drift. On “Some Sunny Day,” the guitar glances off her distant voice as she sings about closing her eyes and seeing the face of a loved one she’ll never see again. The lovely album opener, “Lost,” is about the impossible challenge of trying to access someone else’s pain. “But how she feels I’ll never know … it’s lost to me,” she sings against a track that lifts up her spare acoustic guitar with orchestral backing.
Three straight songs in the middle of the album linger on the same tactile image: on “Changes,” the graying hair of her mother; on “Abigail,” she sings about the purple hair of someone she likes; on “Thinking of You,” she opens the song combing her own hair, a mundane task that can’t distract her from feeling “stuck in a memory.” Along with being a bracingly honest reckoning with trauma and its aftereffects, Evergreen is also musically right-up-front. Her last album, Sometimes, Forever, had some synthy experimentation. Here the songs begin with her spare yet painterly Liz Phair strumming and build into Pet Sounds-like micro epics. The very moving results brings to mind find-the-river classics like REM’s Automatic For the People. This is music that isn’t about moving beyond grief, but living in it as truthfully as anyone can expect from one human being.
