‘Still’ is a hauntingly confessional closer written during a particularly dark period in Allison’s life: “I don’t know how to feel things small,” she sings, “It’s a tidal wave or nothing at all.” The fittingly bare-bones instrumentation enhances every part of the song that is uneasy and powerful.
Or, perhaps, wonder how things got to that point. The idea of circularity – that you can’t stop the spiral of either positive or negative experiences – more subtly imbues Sometimes, Forever, which begins with Allison singing, “I feel the bones of how we used to be/ They crowd the space between us in our sheets.” The lyrics feel perfectly tangible yet evoke a certain nostalgia that pulls you back in the moment the album comes to a close you want to play it back, keep chasing the thrill. The swirling layers of color theory mirrored its portrayal of mental illness, allowing Allison to delve into a pervasive darkness as well as the unpredictable forms it takes as it crawls through to the surface. From their earliest lo-fi recordings to the poignant indie rock of her 2018 studio debut Clean to 2020’s heavier color theory, the band has experimented with new ways of expanding and colouring the edges of their songs, but it’s all about amplifying what simmers at their core, an essence that feels eerily similar each time but never quite the same. The emotions that course through Soccer Mommy’s music have always been dizzying in their intensity. A desire that must be fed, a thread that never ends. Listening to Sometimes, Forever, though, it’s the specific connotations of blood jet that carry the most weight: in Allison’s lyrics, blood grows from a marker of pain to some hazy feeling, a token of intimacy and even success. “The blood jet is poetry” is one of the most famous statements Plath made about her art, but its unsettling ambiguity – is she ascribing meaning to poetry or a physical sensation? – reminds me of Allison’s work, too. The way Allison’s writing stares down a well of darkness and self-destruction suggests that it’s fuelled by a similar kind of creative drive, one that’s vital and irrepressible.
For one thing, Sophie Allison invokes the poet directly on ‘Darkness Forever’, which opens with the lines: “Head in the oven/ Didn’t sound so crazy/ My brain was burning/ Hot to the touch.” Several profiles were quick to draw attention to the parallels it invited. “The blood jet is poetry,” Sylvia Plath wrote in her poem ‘Kindness’, “and there is no stopping it.” There are a few reasons this quote runs through my mind as I listen to Soccer Mommy’s addictive new album, Sometimes, Forever.
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