Chicago-based indie outfit Smut — Tay Roebuck (vocals), Andrew Min (guitar), Bell Cenower (bass, synth), Sam Ruschman (guitar, synth) and Aidan O’Connor (drums) — will be releasing their new album How the Light Felt on November 11 through Bayonet Records.
While 2020’s Power FantasyEP saw Smut dipping its toe into more experimental waters, How the Light Felt reportedly sees the band diving head-first into their vast array of 80s and 90s influences, including Oasis, Cocteau Twins, Gorillaz, and Massive Attack — while pushing their sound in a new direction.
How the Light Felt‘s material can be traced back to 2017: Following her sister’s death, Tay Roebuck turned to writing to help her navigate a labyrinth of grief and heartache. “This album is very much about the death of my little sister, who committed suicide a few weeks before her high school graduation in 2017,” Roebuck explains in press notes. ” “It was a moment in which my life was destroyed permanently, and it’s something you cannot prepare for.”
Roebuck’s bandmates composed the song’s arrangements, excavating underutilized 90s guitar tones and drum beats to build an expansive sonic world for her lyrics. “A couple weeks after the funeral we played a show and I couldn’t keep it together,” Roebuck says, “but we just kept playing and started writing because it was truly all I felt I had, it was all I could do to feel any sense of purpose. For the past five years now I’ve been chipping my way through grief and loss and I think the album itself is just the story of a person working through living with a new weight on top of it all.”
While rooted in profound heartbreak and loss, the album’s material pairs nostalgic inducing guitar tones, lush yet unfussy production, lived-in lyricism, and earnest vocals in a way that turns pain into a bittersweet yet necessary catharsis. Certainly, if you’ve lost a loved one, the album will likely resonate with you on a deeper level than most.
How the Light Felt‘s lead single “After Silver Leaves” is an infectious, 120 Minutes era MTV alt rock-inspired anthem centered around reverb-drenched guitar jangle, driving rhythms paired with Roebuck’s gorgeous and expressive vocals, an enormous, sing-a-long worthy hook and a scorching guitar solo. While sonically recalling Reading, Writing and Arithmetic-era The Sundays, “After Silver Leaves” is rooted in deeply personal, embittering experience.
“This song is about a former relationship I was in, it was really horribly abusive. But the approach to this one was to just spell it all out and see how silly it feels once shit really hits the fan,” Roebuck says. “The song sounds so happy, but I’m talking about driving someone to a hospital when they’ve overdosed. And having to detach myself and realize that maybe it’s not my job as a teenage girl to save some sad sack of a guy. I think a lot of young women will relate to that, unfortunately.”
Directed by Aidan O’Connor, the accompanying black and white video for “After Silver Leaves” is loosely inspired by iconic 80s music videos, helping to further emphasize the 120 Minutes MTV-like vibe.
Beirut-based outfit Sandmoon — Sandra Arslanian (vocals, guitar), Sam Wehbi (guitar), George Flouty (bass) and Dan Shurki (drums) — have developed and honed a unique take on indie rock that draws from the Arslanian’s multicultural, international background: the Sandmoon frontperson is Armenian-Lebanese and was born in Beirut and spent her formative years in Belgium.
Throughout their growing catalog, which includes 2014’s full-length debut, Home, 2016’s #InTheEnd EP, 2018’s Put A Gun/Commotion EP and 2020’s Fadi Tabbal-produced sophomore album Put A Gun/Commotion, the members of the Beirut-based quartet have infused Western indie rock with subtle Middle Eastern intonations and melancholy and an unerring sense of melodicism.
Adding to a growing profile in their native Lebanon, the band wrote the soundtrack to Phillipe Aractingi’s 2016 film Listen, which received Best Soundtrack Award at 2017’s Lebanese Movie Awards.
Sandmoon’s Sandra Arslanian has also been very busy with a number of side projects including “Odyssée, Ode to the City” with poet Corinne Boulad, which has been selected in festivals in Beirut, Germany, Italy, Greece and California — and has won Best Spoken Word Poetry Award at the Monologues & Poetry International Film Festival.
Sandmoon’s highly-anticipated third album While We Watch the Horizon Sink is slated for release later this year. Earlier this year, I wrote about the album’s first single, the slow-burning “Wake Up.” Centered around painterly, shoegaze textures, Arslanian’s plaintive vocals, cinematic keys paired with a soaring hook, the song, which the band describes as sounding “like a crossover of Radiohead and Laura Marling with an imperceptible Middle Eastern flavor,” but to my ears recalls the likes of Cocteau Twins and Slowdive.
As the band explained, the song is “about looking beyond the surface, going to the essence of things.”
While We Watch the Horizon Sink‘s latest single “Where Do We Go from Here” continues a remarkable run of atmospheric material rooted in patient, painterly textures and dream-like melodies that sonically brings both Beach House-like dream pop and A Storm in Heaven-era shoegaze to mind. “‘Where Do We Go From Here,’ is a melodic indie pop song about seeking guidance from a trusted person. The person might have a mental condition (like Alzheimer), yet it is her guidance within, her guidance to our hearts, that is sought,” the members of Sandmoon explain.
Directed by Lujain Jo, the accompanying video is a hazy and nostalgic dream of a loved one, who has departed — or is extremely ill. Capturing that loved one in their fullness of their lives, and others in their youth, imbues the video with a heartbreaking sense of a loss, grief and love.
Since forming in Halifax, UK over a decade ago, while their members were still in their teens, JOVM mainstays The Orielles — siblings Sidonie B. Hand-Halford (drums), Esmé Dee Hand-Halford (vocals, bass) and their best friend Henry Carlyle (guitar, vocals) — have released three critically applauded albums, 2017’s Silver Dollar Moment, 2020’s Disco Volador and last year’s La Vita Olistica, which has seen the band move from lo-fi DIY indie rock to Stereolab and A Certain Ratio-inspired avant pop.
When all of the band’s live dates to promote their sophomore album were scrapped as a result of the pandemic, the JOVM mainstays spent 2020 creating La Vita Olistica, a high-concept art film written and directed by the Hand-Halford sisters, which they toured in cinemas during the following year. This was the beginning of a series of creative breakthroughs that would result in Tableau, the band’s forthcoming album.
One of those breakthroughs came about when the band was booked to host a monthly show on Soho Radio. Those broadcasts quickly became impromptu research and development sessions for the ideas that would feed into the album. “Doing that monthly meant we had a reason to meet up and bring two hours of music between us which we’d play, discuss, hold physically and share,” the band’s Henry Carlyle says in press notes. “We were listening to much more contemporary music than before,” Esmé Dee Hand-Halford adds.
Another breakthrough came while remixing another band’s track in a studio in Goyt, UK. This wound up becoming what the band dubbed the Goyt method, a central creative process behind the forthcoming album. “To Goyt it” Sidonie B. Hand-Halford explains, “that’s getting all these pieces and rearranging them. We had vocal melodies and ideas that we’d then run through and sample, and play them on sample pads. We were being editors, really.”
The JOVM mainstays also completely revamped their long-held creative process: Where they had previously only gone into the studio once songs had been tightly crafted at the demo stage, the band began to consider new practices in line with the contemporary sound they were aspiring to craft. No demos, and a lot of improvisation. They also used experimental 1960s-era tape looping and Autotunes. The album also sees them drawing from teh likes of Burial and Sonic Youth. And for the first time, no outside producer — but the band collaborated with friend and producer Joel Anthony Patchett.
Mostly recorded during last summer while the band was holed away in Eastbourne, UK, the album not only sees the band quickly adopting contemporary production, but concepts from the art world and minimalism, as well. Sidonie B. Hand-Halford researched the graphic scoring method of Pulitzer Prize-nominated trumpeter and composer Wadada Leo Smith. They also used Oblique Strategies, the playing cards designed to aide creativity created by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt in the early 1970s. “We’d been speaking about wanting to use them for ages, and then we found a set of cards at the studio in Eastbourne,” explains Sidonie, “before each song, we’d pick out a card and that would be our motif for playing that take.”
Slated for an October 7, 2022 release through Heavenly Recordings, Tableau is a double album that reportedly rewards serious immersion, because it’s both complex and diverse. And while the album will likely challenge preconceptions, this is something that the band suggests they’ve been doing throughout their career anyway. “All through our whole career we’ve had to prove ourselves so, so much” Carlyle says. “You can’t disconnect the age and the gender thing either” Esmé Dee Hand-Halford says. “People belittle your age because they see women in the band. Whereas lad bands, if they’re eighteen it’s apparently exactly what people want to see.” Being from a small town in West Yorkshire may have added to that also, but Sidonie counters that “being from Halifax has also been a blessing, it’s kept our egos in check.”
Of course along with that, the album is also the product the product of the unique telepathy between three singular musicians that have grown in symbiosis for over a decade — and the three of them vibing and trading ideas together in a room. “As creators, for the fact we’ve produced it ourselves, it feels like a starting point” Esmé Dee Hand-Halford suggests, “even though everything that’s going previously has counted, this now feels like Ground Zero.” For the future, now, it’s all gates open.
Clocking in at 7:53, Tableau‘s expansive first single “BEAM/S” is a shapeshifting and cinematic bit of dream pop-meets-avant-garde jazz/pop featuring twinkling and fluttering synths, a jangling and chugging guitars, ethereal vocals and a soaring string arrangement. Sonically, the song evokes continuous and unending change and uncertainty — while continuing the band’s genre-bending approach with the song revealing nods to dream pop, slowcore, avant-garde pop and even Afrobeat.
“This is a song that has travelled, grown and adapted with us through all of the seasons,” Esmé Dee Hand-Halford explains. “This is why the lyrics kind of reflect that, the song reflects the changing of conditions. The warping of time, memories and relationships that you foster along the way. The original track was jammed at practice, Henry would bring his recording gear and it came about in quite an off the cuff way. I can’t remember how we really began jamming that. We further developed it whilst jamming at Eve Studios. We added distortion pedals and made it really big, but then going into the studio months later, maybe a year or more, we pared it back slightly. The majority of the song is just us in a room, a big room at that, which did the track a lot of justice. We wrote a visual score inspired by Wadada Leo Smith for this one, and then in the later half you hear the group percussion which is the final fallout of the song, and has nods to Afrobeat, where the majority of the song is taking this slowcore, emo feel to it. The track was originally titled ‘Brian Emo.’
Co-directed by the band and Mackenzie AJ Thompson, the accompanying video for “BEAM/S” is a surreal fever dream, chock-filed with some stunningly cinematic imagery.
Throughout the course of this site’s 12 year history, I’ve spilled copious amounts of virtual ink covering Nashville-based indie rock act Palm Ghosts. Led by singer/songwriter and producer and Ice Queen Records founder Joseph Lekkas, Palm Ghosts can trace its origins to when Lekkas lived in Philadelphia: After spending a number of years playing in local bands like Grammar Debate! and Hilliard, Lekkas took a lengthy hiatus from writing, recording and performing music to book shows and festivals in and around the Philadelphia area.
Lekkas initially started Palm Ghosts as a solo recording project — and as a creative outlet to cope with an incapacitating bout of depression and anxiety. During a long, prototypically Northeastern winter, Lekkas recorded a batch of introspective songs that at the time, he dubbed “sun-damaged American music,” which eventually became the project’s full-length debut. After a short tour in 2013 to support the album, Lekkas packed up his belongings and relocated to Music City, enticed by its growing indie rock scene.
Much like countless musical acts across the globe, Lekkas and his bandmates spent the forced downtime of the pandemic, attempting to be as busy as they possible could: They wrote a ton of new material informed by a year or so of quarantine-related isolation, socioeconomic and financial instability, protests and demonstrations.
Last year, the JOVM mainstays released two albums, their fourth album, Lifeboat Candidate and their fifth album, Lost Frequency. Lifeboat Candidate was a fittingly dark, dystopian effort full of confusion, fear and dread that drew from the events and circumstances of the year preceding its release. Interestingly, Lost Frequency is a much different album: Initially scheduled for a 2020 release, Palm Ghosts’ fifth album harkens back to before the pandemic, when things seemed more or a less normal and carefree — or at least somehow a bit less uneasy and desperately urgent. In some way, the album’s material feels both celebratory, escapist, and perhaps even somewhat nostalgic. But paradoxically, the album’s material lyrically brings confrontation to the forefront, reminding the listener that nothing is normal — and that normalcy and the desire to return to it is extremely destructive.
The JOVM’s mainstays forthcoming sixth album Post Preservation reveals an entirely different side of the band. The album’s material features love songs — and there’s even a hint of optimism and some light showing through the cracks. But it’s still 2022, and there’s still plenty of darkness and discontent to the proceedings to balance the sunniness of much of the material. Conceived as a sort of soundtrack to a long lost John Hughes film, Post Preservation is full of nostalgic longing for a world that no longer exists, except in our hearts and minds.
Post Preservation‘s latest single “Cross Your Heart” is a swooning, hook-driven power ballad that sonically is one-part Psychedelic Furs‘ “Pretty in Pink,” one-part Simple Minds‘ “Don’t You (Forget About Me)” and paired with earnest, lived-in lyrics that describe being in — and perhaps out of — love, at the end of the world.
The accompanying video is nostalgia-fueled fever dream featuring the band playing the song together at what appears to be either a house party or a rehearsal space, fuzzy nuclear snow, images of sun-dappled forests, adding to the overall dystopian yet hopeful feel.
Montreal-based singer/songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, animator and visual artist Jonathan Robert may be best known for being a co-founder and co-lead vocalist of internationally acclaimed JOVM mainstay act Corridor. But Robert is also an acclaimed solo artist, writing and performing as Jonathan Personne.
Robert’s solo debut as Jonathan Personne, Histoire Naturelle, sonically drew from desert dream pop, Western Spaghetti rock and jangle pop. Thematically, the album’s material focused on the potential end of the world. Of course, with the album’s timing, it might have hit the nail a bit too hard on the head.
His sophomore Jonathan Personne album, 2020’s Guillaume Chiasson-product Disparitions was primarily written while the Montreal-based artist was touring with Corridor, and came about in a quick and fluid fashion. While the album saw Robert continuing upon the hook-driven yet intimate and sensitive songwriting that has won him acclaim as a solo artist, Disparitions was largely inspired by moment when music became a source of profound disgust. “I spent a lot of time touring away from home. Towards the end I felt like I was reluctantly going to do something that I had longed wished for,” Robert explained in press notes.
The Montreal-based singer/songwriter began 2022 by signing with Bonsound, who will be releasing his third Jonathan Personne album, the Emmanuel Éthier-produced Jonathan Personne on Friday. Written alone on an acoustic guitar in a cottage, the album took an unexpected turn, when the Montreal-based artist went to Quebec City-based Le Pantoum with his friends and frequent collaborators Samuel Gougoux (drums), Julian Perreault (guitar), Mathieu Cloutier (bass) and the aforementioned Éthier (violin, synths, mellotron, vocals and production). The album’s material features arrangements centered around electric guitar, 12-string acoustic guitar, Rhodes, timpani, mellotron, synths, violin and even samples, the eight-song album continues Robert’s reputation for crafting material inspired by 60s pop and Spaghetti Westerns but with samples from obscure TV shows and movies, blistering rock grooves and extravagant guitar licks, the album features a more polished production than previous releases.
Packaged with a Jonathan Robert illustration in which two children discover the remains of a dead body, the album thematically is rooted in duality: While continuing his reputation for breezy guitar pop, the album’s material is simultaneously brutal and sinister, yet candid. The album’s material evokes a mysterious world where ghosts, the supernatural, fate and broken characters with broken lives all intertwine and interact.
Featuring a Jonathan Robert illustration in which two children discover the remains of a dead body as its album cover art, the album thematically is rooted in duality: Continuing his reputation for breezy guitar pop, the album is also brutal, sinister yet candid. The end result is an album that evokes a mysterious world where ghosts, the supernatural, fate and broken characters with broken lives intertwine.
In the lead-up to the album’s release later this week, I’ve managed to write about two album singles:
“Un homme sans visage” a deceptively breezy song centered around an arrangement of gorgeous Mellotron-driven melody, jangling guitar, simple yet propulsive rhythms, bursts of lap steep, big hooky choruses and Robert’s plaintive falsetto. While continuing to be lovingly inspired by the sounds of the late 60s, the song is a bittersweet, modern fable of sorts that tells a story about a man, whose face is badly burned in a fire.
“Rock & roll sur ton chemin,” a deceptively straightforward rocker centered around a loose and breezy surf rock-like riff and a churning groove paired with dreamily delivered falsetto harmonies and Robert’s penchant for big, catchy hooks paired with subtle amounts of bongo, Mellotron and whistles. But despite it’s breezy air, the song is bittersweet and drenched with irony with the song being a tribute to dying art forms and those, who still practice them. “Devoting oneself to a genre destined to failure, there’s something pathetic about it, but also something very beautiful,” Robert says.
Jonathan Personne‘s third and latest single, “À présent” sounds indebted to Scott Walker‘s orchestral pop and Phil Spector‘s famous Wall of Sound production but with a greatest emphasis on the jangling rhythm section, which subtly pushes the whole affair into more contemporary realm. Thematically, the song depicts a world where excess, speed and love coexist in a setting that’s kind of a synthesis of Romeo and Juliet and James Dean’s life with the song’s central couple dying in a horrific accident.
Animated by Mathieu Larone and Henry McClellan, the accompanying video for “À présent” is abstract but centered in dualities, evoking the album’s themes: the animation is both childlike and disturbing, broodingly dark and colorful. But throughout, the intention was to present the optimistic vision of a new beginning.
“Mathieu and Henry were able to translate the song into images, and it’s just beautiful! It’s like an excerpt from the movie Fantasia, only weirder, darker, and done by the NFB rather than Disney,” Jonathan Robert says.
With the release of 2016’s full-length debut, the folky Don’t Let The Kids Win, acclaimed Melbourne-based singer/songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Julia Jacklin quickly carved out a reputation for being a direct lyricist, willing to excavate the parameters of intimacy and anger with songs that were simultaneously stark and raw, loose and playful. 2018’s sophomore album Crushing managed to draw the listener in even closer.
Jacklin’s third album PRE PLEASURE is slated for a Friday release through Polyvinyl Record Co. Conceived upon returning home at the end of an extensive world tour to support Crushing, PRE PLEASURE‘s material was finished in a frantic few months of recording in Montreal with co-producer Marcus Paquin. “The songs on this record took either three years to write or three minutes,” Jacklin says.
Jacklin teamed up with her Canadian touring band, which features The Weather Station’s Ben Whiteley (bass) and Will Kidman (guitar), Folly and the Hunter’s Laurie Torres (drums) and Adam Kinner (drums), as well as string arrangements by Owen Pallett recorded by a full orchestra in Prague.
“Making a record to me has always just been about the experience, a new experience in a new place with a new person at the desk, taking the plunge and just seeing what happens” Jacklin says of traveling to Canada to work with a new producer for the third time in as many albums. “For the first time I stepped away from the guitar, and wrote a lot of the album on the Roland keyboard in my apartment in Montreal with its inbuilt band tracks. I blu-tacked reams of butcher paper to the walls, covered in lyrics and ideas, praying to the music gods that my brain would arrange everything in time.”
The album reportedly sees Jacklin expanding upon her signature sound while thematically conjuring the ripples and fault lines caused by unreliable communication.
In the lead-up to PRE PLEASURE‘s release, I’ve written about two of the album’s singles:
“I Was Neon,” a relentless motorik groove-driven track featuring buzzing guitars, Jacklin’s plaintive delivery and an enormous, arena rock friendly hook. And while being an anthemic bit of rock-leaning pop — or perhaps pop-leaning rock? — the song is rooted in earnest, lived-in lyricism that simultaneously expresses crippling self-doubt with a deeply, intelligent, almost winking self-awareness of how ridiculous it all is.
“Love, Try Not To Let Go” is a shimmering and swooning Fleetwood Mac-like track featuring Jacklin’s achingly tender delivery floating over twinkling keys, reverb-drenched guitars before exploding into thundering guitar chords during the song’s bridge. It’s a fittingly gorgeous yet brooding arrangement for a song that describes the confusing mix of hesitation and desire one feels towards love, heartbreak and moving forward.
“Be Careful With Yourself,” PRE PLEASURE‘s is a hazy and dreamy slow-burner, centered around layers of jangling guitars, driving rhythms and ethereal harmonies paired with Jacklin’s effortless vocals and her unerring knack for anthemic hooks. At itNs core though, “Be Careful With Yourself” is an honest and vulnerable love song full of hope — hope for the longevity of the partner and the relationship in a way that captures the hopes of a fledging relationship.
Los Angeles-based indie outfit Night Talks — Soraya Sebghati (vocals), Jacob Butler (guitar) and Josh Arteaga (bass) — released their sophomore album Same Time Tomorrow earlier this year.
Recorded between 2019 and 2020, Same Time Tomorrow sees the band firmly establishing a pop rock sound centered around Sebghati’s pop star belter vocals, shimmering guitar lines, propulsive bass, forceful drums and anthemic choruses. The album as the band explains “is a refined rock/pop album with plenty of material to dance, cry and feel to.”
When the pandemic forced a change to their release plans, the members of the band took the opportunity to make its roll out special: They used their newfound free time to give each of the album’s songs an accompanying music video. And each video was conceptualized, directed, edited, costumed, set-designed and colored by the band.
Last month, I wrote about album single “On and On,” which debuted on KROQ’s Locals Only show back in February and since then, it has been in the top five, including eight weeks at #1 — and once you hear it, you’ll see why it’s been topping the charts: Simply put, it’s a big, heart-worn-on-sleeve, pop anthem featuring twinkling synths, glistening guitars, propulsive rhythms, Sebghati’s powerhouse vocals and their penchant for enormous, arena friendly choruses and hooks. The first time I heard it, I could picture a room full of sweaty concertgoers singing along with the song’s chorus — while pointing at a deeper, universal truth within all of our relationships
“The song ‘On And On’ came from my realization that though relationships will come and go throughout your life, they often follow similar paths,” Night Talk’s Soraya Sebghati explains. “The relationships I had with friends and family when I was a kid have changed considerably in my adult life, but they have a lot of the same rhythms. The phrase ‘Same Time Tomorrow’ represents a willingness to show up and put in the work to fix or maintain a relationship, especially when you’re in a rough patch. Things might be difficult, but that doesn’t mean you’re done– it just means that you’ll show up the next day and try again.”
Same Time Tomorrow‘s latest single “Overcome” continues a run of sleek, slickly produced, radio friendly, pop rock built around earnest, lived-in songwriting, and well-placed, rousingly anthemic, cathartic hooks and choruses. While arguably being one of the most defiantly upbeat songs I’ve come across in the past few weeks, “Overcome” is rooted in a heartbreak that’s devastating and all too familiar.
“Overcome is about the dissolution of a friendship. I feel like friend breakups are just as painful as romantic relationship breakups, but it can feel so much weirder,” Night Talks’ Soraya Sebghati explains. “Sometimes you grow out of friendships or grow apart from each other, and sometimes you realize that the friendship isn’t serving either person in a positive or healthy way.
At the end of the day, things did turn out okay. The pain is not permanent and it is possible to overcome the hurt and weird feelings that come from losing a friend.”
The accompanying video for “Overcome” continues a run of mischievous, playful visuals created, edited and shot by the band. Opening with a literal blank canvas, the video explodes into color and is chock full of hilarious visual gags and easter eggs that reveal themselves with repeated viewings.
Sophie Allison is a Swiss-born, Nashville-based singer/songwriter, guitarist and the creative mastermind behind the critically applauded indie rock project Soccer Mommy. Allison first picked up guitar when she was six — and as a teenager, she attended Nashville School of the Arts, where she studied guitar and played in the school’s swing band. During the summer of 2015, the Swiss-born, Nashville-based artist began posting home-recorded songs as Soccer Mommy and posted them to Bandcamp, just as she was about to attend New York University (my alma mater, no less!), where she studied music business at the University’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development.
While she was in college, Allison played her first Soccer Mommy show at Bushwick, Brooklyn’s Silent Barn. She caught the attention of Fat Possum Records, who signed her to a record deal — and after spending two years at NYU, she returned to Nashville to pursue a full-time career in music. Upon her return to Nashville, she wrote and released two Soccer Mommy albums — 2016’s For Young Hearts released through Orchid Tapes and 2017’s Collection released through Fat Possum.
Before the pandemic, Allison, much like countless other artists was gearing up for a big year: she started off 2020 by playing one of Bernie Sanders’ presidential rallies and joined a lengthy and eclectic list of artists, who endorsed his presidential campaign. That year also saw the release of her critically applauded sophomore album color theory, which she had planned to support with a headline tour with a number of sold-out dates months in advance that included a stop Glastonbury Festival and her late-night, national TV debut on Jimmy Kimmel Live!
With touring at a half as a result of the pandemic, Allison, much like countless other artists recognized that the time off from touring offered a unique opportunity to get creative and experiment with new ideas and new ways to connect with fans.
Combining her love of video games and performing, Allison had a digital show on Club Penguin Rewritten with over 10,000 attendees, who all had to make their own penguin avatars to attend. The show was so popular, that the platform’s servers crashed, forcing a rescheduling of the event. Of course, Allison has also played a number of live-streamed sets, including ones hosted by NPR’s Tiny Desk At Home (which she kicked off) and Pitchfork‘s IG Live Series. She also released her own Zoom background images for her fans to proudly show off their Soccer Mommy fandom.
Allison and her backing band embarked on a Bella Clark-directed 8 bit, virtual music video tour that saw Soccer Mommy playing some of the cities she had been scheduled to play if the pandemic didn’t happen — in particular, Minneapolis, Chicago,Seattle, Toronto, and Austin. Instead of having the visual shows at a traditional music venue or a familiar tourist spot, the band were mischievously placed in highly unusual places: an abandoned Toronto subway station, a haunted Chicago hotel, a bat-filled Austin bridge underpass and the like. The video tour featured color theory single “crawling in my skin,” a song centered around looping and shimming guitars, a sinuous bass line, shuffling drumming, subtly shifting tempos and an infectious hook.
She closed out 2020 with an Adam Kolodny-directed, fittingly Halloween-themed visual for “crawling in my skin” that’s full of the creeping and slow-burning dread that reminds me of Roger Corman’s Edgar Allan Poe movies with Vincent Price.
Allison’s newest album, the Daniel Lopatin (a.k.a. Oneohtrix Point Never)-produced Sometimes, Forever was released earlier this year through Loma Vista/Concord. The new album sees Allison pushing her sound in new directions — but without eschewing the unsparing lyricism and catchy melodies that have won her attention across the blogosphere and elsewhere.
Inspired by the concept that neither sorrow nor happiness is permanent, Sometimes, Forever is a fresh peek into the mind of a bold, young artist who synthesizes everything — retro sounds, personal tumult, the disorder of modern life — into music that feels built to last for a long time. The album’s material is also partly inspired by the uncomfortable push and pull between her desire to make meaningful art, her skepticism about the mechanics of careerism, and the mundane, artless administrative chaos that comes with all of it.
The album’s first single, the woozy “Shotgun” is an infectious banger centered around a classic grunge song structure — quiet verses, explosive choruses paired with layers of distorted guitars, Allison’s achingly plaintive vocals, an enormous hook, thunderous drumming and a throbbing groove.
“Shotgun” manages to liken a young romance to a sort of chemical high — but without the bruising and sickening comedown, which always comes after. But throughout the song, its narrator focuses on small moments in a particular love affair that’s imbued with a deep, personal meaning, “‘Shotgun’ is all about the joys of losing yourself in love,” explains Allison. “I wanted it to capture the little moments in a relationship that stick with you.”
Rising indie electro pop outfit Magdalena Bay recently remixed “Shotgun” turning the track into a futuristic, glittery, club banger featuring glistening synth arpeggios, tweeter and woofer rattling thump and wobbling low end paired with Allison’s plaintive vocals fed through gentle amounts of vocoder and other effects. While being a decidedly bold and adventurous, the Magdalena Bay remix retains the core elements of the original — Allison’s penchant for earnest, lived-in lyricism, enormous hooks and the song’s overall woozy feel.
Allison will embarking on a lengthy and extensive international tour that begins with an intimate, sold-out, solo show for the Grammy Museum Los Angeles next Monday. Allison and her backing band will then head to the UK and the European Union for a month-long tour. She’ll close out the year with a lengthy North American tour that includes a November 16, 2022 stop at Brooklyn Steel. Check out the rest of the tour dates below.
