Chances are you were first introduced to Nashville singer-songwriter SOCCER MOMMY (aka Sophie Allison) through last year’s aptly titled Collection, a somewhat ramshackle compilation of previous Bandcamp releases reimagined with a full band. But with the release of the second single off her forthcoming debut studio album, Clean, she’s starting to fill out our understanding of what a more cohesive, deliberately constructed Soccer Mommy project might look like.
‘Cool’ rests on a breezy, seemingly carefree surface of fuzzy, sun-soaked electric guitars that conceals the grimy and emotionally confused underbelly of Soccer Mommy’s track. The murk of her lyrics, brilliantly invoked from the imagery of the opening lines - “Mary has a heart of coal / She’ll break you down and eat you whole / I saw her do it after school, she’s an animal” - jars against the bright indie rock facade, but it never seeps the entire way in.
Carrying over many of the same lyrical themes as previous single, ‘Your Dog’, Allison explained that “the song focuses on this other person who’s desirable and cool, and it shows how sometimes you can romanticise the idea of being different than you are. It comes from a place of insecurity and idealisation, which is a feeling that hangs over a lot of the album.”
Here, she laments that she can’t live up to the “cool girl” trope, but updates the trope for a post-Gone Girl world. Her protagonist, Mary, isn’t “cool” in the detached, nonchalant sense of the term. Instead, she actively destroys the boys that grow obsessed with the fantasy of her. And while she warns that “She’ll treat you like a fucking toy / She’ll break your heart and steal your joy / Like a criminal,” it seems that Soccer Mommy, too, has fallen for the fantasy of Mary.
As Soccer Mommy confesses her insecurity and desire on the chorus, her soft vocals lift with melodic oooh’s, drawing the word “you” out to the point where you can hear Allison cycling through her emotions as she muses on her subject. It’s almost appropriate, given that it’s a love ballad of sorts. At the end, she introduces a hint of a guitar solo, before it quickly descends into dissonance. Finally, the murkiness of the lyrics matches the music, and maybe Soccer Mommy has moved one step closer to becoming Mary.
The track would be impressive enough by itself, but coming off the heels of the also fantastic ‘Your Dog’, it points towards a newfound cohesiveness to Allison’s Soccer Mommy project: “I’d never made a full album before, just EPs and random tracks thrown together. I wanted it to be a lot more cohesive than the rest of the stuff that came before. I wanted to make something that was a full piece of my life, that addressed similar themes and held together as a whole.”
Clean is out Friday, March 2 on Fat Possum Records via Inertia Music – you can pre-order it here.
IMAGE: Shervin Lainez
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