Momma On How Their Musical Journey 'Feels Like A New Incarnation Of The Band Every Single Time'

On their fourth album, Welcome To My Blue Sky, US indie outfit Momma decided to embrace brutal honesty. “It felt really good to purge with this one,” says Etta Friedman, who fronts the band alongside co-songwriter Allegra Weingarten.

“We didn't really know how confessional and autobiographical this record was going to be until we started writing it,” Weingarten offers. “But we had a lot going on in our personal lives, [so] we had so much more to say.”

The band were formed in 2015 in the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles (think: many Paul Thomas Anderson films), when Friedman and Weingarten were still in high school. Drawing from a host of ’90s influences —Veruca Salt and The Breeders are the most common comparisons; they’ve cited Pavement as key figures— the pair cut their teeth on songs that were character studies, often writing satirically from a host of fictional perspectives.

It made sense, given their own youth, that they would imagine scenarios. When they went their separate ways to go to college, writing shared fictional creations was a way to bond over distance. “It was an easy common ground,” Friedman says, “and also cool to build up a world of these characters. It was fun that we both were able to tap into that.”

After independently releasing two albums, 2018’s Interloper and 2020’s Two of Me, things changed with their third album, 2022’s Household Name. Released on the esteemed Polyvinyl label (most famously the label for American Football, but also the US home of Julia Jacklin), it marked Momma’s breakout, leading to a bout of full-time touring, including a stint opening for Weezer.

Don't miss a beat with our FREE daily newsletter

All that time on the road led to drinking, infidelity, regrets and mistakes. And, ultimately, the end of five-year relationships for both Friedman and Weingarten, which beget a cross-country move from Los Angeles to Brooklyn. This is the grist of Welcome To My Blue Sky, where the Momma songwriters spill their guts, sift through the wreckage, yet still maintain their ability to shift narrators: the song Rodeo written from the perspective of a past partner.

“We thought if we were just writing about the one experience that we both shared, it was going to end up being redundant, that we were going to keep saying the same things,” Weingarten says. “[But] every time we sat down to write, we felt like there was a new thing that we could talk about, or a new angle or perspective that we could look at it from.”

“There were a lot of things that we needed to get out, a lot to say,” Friedman continues. “Writing the record was definitely therapeutic in that way. And we used the songwriting as a way for us to talk about what we were going through. And I feel like we got a lot closer. I mean, not that could get much closer, ’cause we’re like family, but there were a lot of heart-to-heart conversations happening.”

In their early teenage days, there were times when the duo did write songs directly for people. “Back then it was so easy to write a song about a situationship or a fling,” Weingarten recalls, “and be like, ‘I really hope this person hears it because then they'll see how much I'm longing for them, or how much they hurt me’ or whatever. [But] it's just a completely different thing when you're writing about a five-year relationship ending and knowing that that person is going to hear what you've been thinking. The stakes are just completely different.”

“It was scarier,” Friedman continues, “because I was admitting to myself that I’m not perfect. And because we were really directly talking about people in our lives that if they listened, they’d absolutely know [it was about them].”

The question then begs, have any of the people written about on Welcome To My Blue Sky responded? “I recently got word of one,” Friedman admits. “And yeah, she knew. She knew what it was about.”

To match the directness of their lyrics, Momma wanted the album itself to echo that clarity. Tired of being “pigeonholed” as ‘90s revivalists, the band “didn't want to just rely on using really loud guitars or really heavy choruses to get a point across or to make a song impactful,” Weingarten says; working with their in-house producer, bassist Aron Kobayashi Ritch, on presenting the songs with less fuzz. “We tried to scale it back when we felt it was necessary, and really meet the emotions of the song.”

Another important element for the band: sequencing the album with an intentional Side A and Side B, thinking of it as a whole artwork. “An album to me is not a container of songs,” states Weingarten. “And I think we all feel that way. When I look at artists that I really admire, every single record has a world built around it.”

Feeling out of time with the rhythms of algorithmic media and the dictates of creating content (“TikTok is really freaky to me,” Friedman winces; “I hate sounding like a Boomer talking about it, but in the age of TikTok, everything is so fleeting,” Weingarten concurs), Momma are “nostalgic for the time when records could actually have a shelf life... let people really spend time with that record, building an era around it,” Weingarten offers.

The three-year gap between their third and fourth albums was largely a response to many tours and hectic lives, but taking that long also means that “it feels like a new incarnation of the band every single time.”

The result is a record that hits a dreaded critical affixation —“maturation”— in style, marking an adult record for a band whose back-catalogue chronicles their youth. Revisiting old records can be strange (“it can feel like I don’t even know the person that wrote it,” Weingarten says), but it is, usually, “a really fun way to look back”, Friedman says. “But then there's parts of me that are also like: ‘I'm so happy that I've grown, I’m so happy that I’m not there anymore’.”

Momma will tour Australia for the first time in January 2026. You can find tickets on the Frontier Touring website.

Presented by Frontier Touring, Penny Drop and Triple R