Soccer Mommy Goes Chromatic

The second album from Soccer Mommy – 22-year-old Sophie Allison – promises to be a colorful affair, albeit a rather depressing one, as far as the subject matter goes.

In stores Feb. 28, color theory is thematically subdivided into three sections, each named for a color characterizing the dark moods of Allison’s emotionally turbulent adolescence. The first, blue, denotes sadness and depression, melancholy and memories of self-harm. The next, yellow, represents illness. “My mom has been terminally ill since I was a pre-teen, and I never really found a way to deal with it,” she says. Finally, there’s gray, symbolizing emptiness and loss. “Watching my parents age and witnessing sickness take its toll made me think a lot about the cycle of life, and forced me to confront the paranoid sense that death is coming for me.”

But don’t dismiss it as a flat-out downer across the board. Musically, performance-wise, there are rays of upbeat sunlight relayed through a prism. “I wanted the experience of listening to color theory to feel like finding a dusty old cassette tape that has become messed up over time, because that’s what this album is: an expression of all the things that have slowly degraded me personally,” she says. “The production warps, the guitar solos occasionally glitch, the melodies can be poppy and deceptively cheerful. To me, it sounds like the music of my childhood distressed and, in some instances, decaying.”

Think you can handle it? Following a week of SXSW duty in Austin, Soccer Mommy will officially kick off her extensive North American tour at Atlanta’s Variety Playhouse on March 26. European dates follow in late Spring.

Photo by Brian Ziff.