Soccer Mommy's Sophie Allison on musical beginnings and women in music

A few weeks ago, Soccer Mommy’s Sophie Allison stood on stage at the 17,000 capacity Barclay Arena in Brooklyn and performed songs sheеd written as a shy teenager in her Nashville bedroom.

The experience sort of blew her mind - but not to the point where it fundamentally changed her idea of who she is or what she wants from her career. A little time spent in Allison’s company confirms that, much like the smart sardonic figure she presents on record, she isn’t the sort to lose her cool over just anything.

“It definitely was something I’ll always remember,” she tells Hot Press in her first Irish interview. “A venue like that is different sound-wise from anything we had done before. For sure it was learning experience. We did a good job.”

Allison and her crew weren’t headlining in Brooklyn. Soccer Mommy’s debut album, Clean, has been flooring critics and is already mopping-up awards - but not to the point where the band are already playing arenas. They’d been invited by Paramore, fellow Tennesseans and a group Allison had come of age listening to.

Soccer Mommy’s debt to millennial pop-rock is one of the surprise nuggets that tends to get trotted out. You can’t quite hear it in Allison’s songs - old school indie growlers and prowlers that hark back to Gen X lodestars such as Juliana Hatfield, Tanya Donnelly and Liz Phair.

Perhaps the influence is better discernible in her poise and level-headedness. Growing up in downtown Nashville, not far from the campus of Belmont University (“a private Christian liberal arts college”), Allison was surrounded by strong musical role models - Paramore’s Hayley Williams and fellow city native done good, Taylor Swift.

“When I was a really young child, a lot of female pop stars were doing pop-rock songs,” reflects Allison. “That was a good thing for me growing up.”

Despite her youth, 20 year-old Allison emerges as a fully-fledged songwriter on Clean. Chronicling break-ups, breakdowns and early adulthood angst in all its Instagram-hued melodrama, the record packs a punch and then some (there are also unmistakeable cap-doffs to the aforementioned Swift’s early confessionals). It’s slathered in urgently jangling guitar and casts the front woman as level headed truth-teller who doesn’t hold back.

“This is what I wanted to do pretty much my whole life,” she nods. “I always thought I was going to be doing it. It comes pretty naturally to me. It’s difficult not to express yourself or write stuff that you’re feeling.”

“Soccer Mommy” isn’t intended as a commentary on middle class, 2.1 kids’ bourgeois existence. Allison started using the name as her Twitter handle and, without ruminating on it especially, adopted it as her band alias. She has of course been asked about it constantly ever since.

“I didn’t put much thought into it. It wasn’t a big decision - I didn’t think I was going to be making music under this name. It was a random thing that happened to do well.”

Born in 1998, the ‘90s are obviously dim and distant for her. But, true to the tenor of her music, she is a fan of the decade.
“Liz Phair was definitely an influence around the time I started making music. I liked ‘90s music - stuff like Hole or Pavement.”

She’s been getting the standard women-in-pop questions since breaking big. I put it to her that these were the very inquiries that the post-grunge artists on whose shoulders she stands were fielding a generation earlier. Surely we’ve moved past being amazed every time a woman straps on a guitar?

“I don’t understand it either. People talk about the ‘90s as if it was a time of women coming into rock - Sheryl Crow, Alanis Morissette, The Breeders. Now we’re talking about it again. It’s like, yeah...women do it too. I think it comes after periods in which boybands are popular. People are shocked to see women making music even though it never really went away. It’s so stupid.”

Clean gets a live airing on September 7 in the Grand Social, Dublin.