Soccer Mommy color theory Vinyl

Today Soccer Mommy—twenty-two year-old Sophie Allison—announces her triumphant sophomore album, color theory. Confronting the ongoing mental health and familial trials that have plagued Allison since pre-pubescence, color theory explores three central themes: blue, representing sadness and depression; yellow, symbolizing physical and emotional illness; and, finally, gray, representing darkness, emptiness and loss.

Written mostly while on tour and recorded in Allison’s hometown of Nashville at Alex The Great, color theory was produced by Gabe Wax (who also produced Clean), mixed by Lars Stalfors (Mars Volta, HEALTH, St. Vincent), and features the live Soccer Mommy band on studio recording for the first time, with a live take at the foundation of almost every track.

The resulting album is a masterpiece that paints an uncompromisingly honest self-portrait of an artist who, according to 100+ publications, already released one of the Best Albums of 2018 and the 2010s, and is about to release an early favorite of 2020. “circle the drain” is out today. Listen to the song on all digital platforms HERE , and watch its Atiba Jefferson-directed (American Football, Turnstile, TV On The Radio, Dinosaur Jr.) music video that was shot in Palm Springs and features pro- skateboarders Sean Malto, Jake Anderson, Curren Caples, and Nicole Hause HERE .

Soccer Mommy has been touring non-stop for the past few years, opening for the likes of Kacey Musgraves, Vampire Weekend, Paramore, Wilco and Liz Phair, selling out countless headline shows, and making her festival debuts at Coachella, Governor’s Ball, Primavera Sound, and more. She recently announced a huge international tour, starting in March 2020 in North America and stopping at some of the biggest venues Allison has ever headlined, including New York’s Brooklyn Steel on April 3rd and Los Angeles’ Fonda Theatre on April 30th.

Today she announces she will return to SXSW in March, and adds a ho For Sophie Allison, color theory is a distillation of hard-won catharsis. “I wanted the experience of listening to color theory to feel like finding a dusty old cassette tape that has become messed up over time, because that’s what this album is: an expression of all the things that have slowly degraded me personally,” Allison says. “The production warps, the guitar solos occasionally glitch, the melodies can be poppy and deceptively cheerful. To me, it sounds like the music of my childhood distressed and, in some instances, decaying.”

Clean demonstrated Allison’s nuanced approach to lyricism and her disinterest in reducing complex emotional worlds into easily-digestible sound bites. On it, she projected the image of a confused but exceedingly mature teenager -- the type to offer up life-saving advice while cutting class under the bleachers. While still a clear successor to Clean and a quintessential Soccer Mommy album, color theory’s sonic landscape is much more vast and dextrous, illustrating how much Allison has evolved as a musician and matured as a person over the past year. The melodies on color theory shimmer on the surface, but they reveal an unsettling darkness with each progressive listen.

The album is thematically subdivided into three sections, each of which is named for a color that distills the mood Allison wanted to freeze in time. We begin with blue, a color that evokes a certain melancholy, and for Allison, illuminates depressive episodes and memories of inflicting self-harm.

The next section is represented by yellow, a color that points to illness, both mental and physical. “My mom has been terminally ill since I was a pre-teen, and I never really found a way to deal with it,” Allison says.

The final section, represented by gray, addresses that fear of loss directly. “Watching my parents age and witnessing sickness take its toll made me think a lot about the cycle of life, and forced me to confront the paranoid sense that death is coming for me,” Allison says. But it’s not all tragic; moments of lightness appear on this album, too. Wise beyond her years, Allison is a songwriter capable of capturing the fleeting moments of bliss that make an embattled existence temporarily beautiful.

With color theory, Allison’s fraught past becomes a lens through which we might begin to understand what it means to be resilient. color theory investigates a traumatic past in exacting detail; in doing so, Allison finds inroads for healing through self-acceptance, and occasionally, humor.

This isn’t a quest to uncover some long- since forgotten happiness so much as it is an effort to stare-down the turmoil of adolescence that can haunt a person well into adulthood. Allison is a gifted storyteller, one who is able to take personal experience and project it to universal scale. On color theory, she beckons in outsiders, rejects, and anyone who has ever felt desperately alone in this world, lending them a place to unburden themselves and be momentarily free.