Soccer Mommy and the Unexpected Healing of ‘Sad Girl Music’

Eighty-seven years ago, in spring 2020, I had a handful of things to keep me sane: my health, thank goodness; my roommate/close friend; and content. Most of it was garbage—90 Day Fiancé was a go-to—but some of it saved my life. The Nintendo Switch video game Animal Crossing: New Horizons, whose launch coincided with lockdown, became somewhat of a phenomenon, and I played the heck out of that. But what I associate with those harrowing months of fear, loneliness, and anxiety just as closely is Soccer Mommy.

Soccer Mommy—the stage name of 25-year-old singer-songwriter Sophie Allison—makes indie rock often referred to as “sad girl music.” That descriptor can be seen as dismissive, reductive, and low-key misogynistic. But to this sad girl, it’s not totally inaccurate. Soccer Mommy’s second studio album, Color Theory, had the somewhat unfortunate luck—commercially speaking—of debuting in late February 2020. But that release timing was, in other ways, perfect, at least for this fan. It meant that the album soundtracked, appropriately, some of the saddest months of my life.

Songs like “Bloodstream,” in which Allison pointedly asks herself, “Why am I so blue?” and “Circle the Drain,” the chorus of which finds her repeating “round and around and around and around,” were well-suited for that time’s awful monotony. But looking back over the years, Allison’s always been good at pointedly expressing and evoking the dominant feelings of my life.

Her 2018 release, Clean, remains one of my favorite albums of all time, an equal-parts angry and devastated ode to desire and heartbreak. I was 24 then, when every guy who was nice to me was someone I was in love with, and every time they didn’t like me back—which was every time, with every guy—I couldn’t get out of bed for days. I put hundreds of hours listening to a cassette tape (seriously) of Clean, crying along with Allison about my frustration with being the uncool, unwanted girl in the room.

Sometimes, Forever, out now, is Soccer Mommy’s third album, a culmination of the work Allison’s put in toward conjuring visceral, emotional worlds, once again summoning the suffocatingly dark mood of what we’ve lived through in the two years since her last album.

Lead single “Shotgun” is as much a classic indie pop song with a big singalong chorus as it is a tightly crafted mini-thriller. The bassline is sexy and a little evil, fully convincing us that Allison is a bullet in that shotgun, as she promises us. Same goes for the haunting “Darkness Forever” (amazing song title) and “Following Eyes,” which makes good on manifesting the Hitchcockian vibe of its title.

“Evil” was a keyword during the creative process, Allison told me, when we spoke by phone last week.

“I think when it came to writing this record, at the very beginning, I was feeling very tormented—in a little bit of this dark [headspace],” Allison said. “There was an evil around me, or a darkness, and it really made me wanna delve into that a bit with some of the writing and, and get kind of creepy with it.”

She was, like the rest of us, stuck at home when she started working on Sometimes, Forever. As a lifelong fan of horror and fantasy, she relished the opportunity to lean further into that mood—as, some to greater extremes than others, many of us were doing at that moment. But when she wasn’t working, she used the extra indoor time to do something even more relatable.

Unlike all the other artists singing their new songs on Instagram Live from their bedrooms, Allison was sitting in front of her computer’s webcam, streaming herself playing the farming-and-dating simulation game Stardew Valley. This wasn’t a pandemic hobby. Allison has been playing games—to an intense, emotional degree—for most of her life now.

“I locked myself in my parents' bathroom crying,” Allison told me. To which I said, same! Except, for her, this wasn’t in 2020. It was many years earlier. “I was in fifth grade at this point. I was a little old for this. [I was crying] because I proposed to someone … and they said no.”

She was obviously not making a real marriage proposal at age 10. Allison was talking about the Harvest Moon series of video games. You play as a young, single farmer, wooing a bachelor or bachelorette slowly but surely; Stardew Valley is a spiritual successor. Any player knows that you can’t propose to your prospective fiancé too early, or you’ll turn them off completely.

“I was so upset that I was locked in the bathroom,” Allison said. “And I remember my mom saying, ‘Okay, what's wrong,’ and coming in. And I was like, ‘He wouldn't marry me.’ And she was like, ‘Oh, the game. This is from a game.’”

I loved this story, because I know it intimately: I, too, cried over messing up my Harvest Moon love life as a fifth grader. (My heart will always belong to you, Elli.)

Learning more about Allison’s gaming habits helped me feel a deeper connection. Gaming has played a huge role in my life, professionally and personally. I got my start in entertainment journalism covering Nintendo titles. And playing Splatoon 2 for six hours a day during that first pandemic summer, for example, gave me a sense of purpose little else in my heavily restricted life could.

Allison never hid her love for video games—why would she?—but it became an increasingly important part of her image as those pandemic months raged on. In April 2020, she “performed” Color Theory on Club Penguin Revisited, the fan-run, dearly departed remake of the kid-friendly MMO (massively multiplayer online) game. In interviews, she gushed about her love for Pokémon. And she spent a lot—like, a lot—of time playing Stardew Valley.

One part of the pull of that game for her is obvious. “I think … the music in [Stardew Valley and Harvest Moon] is so beautiful,” she said. “I love these soundtracks to those games. My ringtone on my phone is a version of the Harvest Moon theme song. I just think they're so beautiful and repetitive and catchy and peaceful. … Those eight-bit sound effects, I love.”

That pixelated, old-school Nintendo aesthetic is something that cropped up a lot during the Color Theory era. “Bloodstream” has an animated video that looks like it was made on a Windows 98 computer. In May 2020, in place of an actual, IRL tour, the band embarked on an “8-bit music video tour.” They starred in a series of animated videos set in different North American cities, each featuring a “performance” of the song “Crawling in My Skin.” Toronto’s video was like a Soccer Mommy version of Pac-Man; in Seattle, they “played” on a hilltop right under the Moon as a warped Space Needle spun across from them.

There’s also the video for 2021 single “rom com 2004,” where Allison appears as a Nintendo Mii character in a PlayStation 1-era adventure game, biking through a jungle and dancing with animals. The whole thing looks like it was recorded on a CRT TV set.

But the other reason Allison loves Stardew and Harvest Moon so much is much more surprising—and kind of hilarious.

“I also think that—and, you know, people might not understand this—but I've been in a relationship for six years, since I was 19. And I think that being able to flirt with a bunch of townspeople really… gives me more romantic energy.”

Allison and her boyfriend Julian Powell, who plays guitar in Soccer Mommy, have what she calls a “perfect” relationship. Which is great! But as romantic as songs like the Sometimes, Forever’s “With U” are, her catalog also has a good deal of kiss-off tracks and break-up anthems.

“[Stardew Valley] is where I get to be chaotic,” she said. This is a game where you give flowers to your crushes in the hopes that they’ll marry you, but it’s also a game where your crushes will confront you, and each other, if they think you’re cheating on them. “I enjoy [my] stable, healthy relationship. But it does allow me to act out my chaotic wish, which can then inspire personal reflection.”

As for whether she has any “chaotic wish” to get more involved in games herself, she’s definitely down to try scoring a game someday down the line, following in the paths of other indie artists like Japanese Breakfast and Anamanaguchi. (She’s especially interested in it if she doesn’t have to write lyrics: “That takes so much out of the process.)

Until then, she’ll continue referencing the classic Nintendo GameCube title Kirby Air Ride as musical inspiration in interviews, making Magic the Gathering-inspired promo art, and playing Nintendo Switch games during press-sponsored livestreams. (She played the soccer game—hahaha!—Super Mario Strikers with Rolling Stone.)

Soccer Mommy is playing shows throughout Europe until the fall, after which the band comes to the States to tour Sometimes, Forever through the end of the year. Hopefully she remembered to pack her Switch.

Read more at The Daily Beast.

Get the Daily Beast's biggest scoops and scandals delivered right to your inbox. Sign up now.

Stay informed and gain unlimited access to the Daily Beast's unmatched reporting. Subscribe now.