Album Review: Soccer Mommy - Colour Theory

Sophie Allison hit the back of the net with her first album as Soccer Mommy in 2018. As championed by Hot Press, Clean was brisk, caustic, and unapologetically indebted to the ghosts of indie-pop past. If you’d spent the previous decade pining for a playful mash-up of Avril Lavigne, Belly and Juliana Hatfield, Allison was the first name on your team-sheet.

Much has changed in the past two years. Now aged 21, Nashville-raised Allison is in a stable relationship and thus less inclined to sing about heartache, terrible boyfriends and young love smushed before its time. Instead she gazes back at a sometimes difficult adolescence overshadowed by her mother’s long-term battle with cancer.

So we’re no longer standing at the indie disco bumper-to-bumper circa 1993. This is a dark record that reaches for catharsis and doesn’t always find it. At moments it is supremely bleak, as when Allison coos over a building caterwaul of guitars on ‘Yellow Is The Colour Of Her Eyes’ (“her” being Allison’s mother).

The angst is ratcheted up on ‘Lucy’ – short for “Lucifer” and an enumeration of the ways life as a touring artist can warp your mortal centre. A personal betrayal, meanwhile, is the subject matter of the chilly ‘Stain’, which is more like an early Tori Amos dirge than something that has crawled out of the brain of Kim Deal. It is torrid stuff – but irresistibly so.

• Out February 28