Soccer Mommy Brighton

Soccer Mommy live in Brighton at CHALK on 6th May 2025!
Get tickets until 5.30pm above until 5.30pm on the show day, or from SeeTickets.

Stage times:

Bored at My Grandmas House: 7.30pm

Soccer Mommy: 8.30pm

Sophie Allison has always written candidly about her life, making Soccer Mommy one of indie rock’s most interesting and beloved artists of the last decade. Allison has used Soccer Mommy’s songs as a vehicle to sort through the thoughts and encounters that inevitably come with the reality of growing up. After all, Soccer Mommy began as a bedroom-to-Bandcamp exercise with teenage Allison posting her plaintive songs as demos. Over the years, though, she has often enhanced that sound, using the endless production possibilities, newly at her fingertips, to outstrip singer-songwriter stereotypes. The records would start with songwriting’s kernels of truth, and she would then imagine all the unexpected shapes they could take. Every Soccer Mommy record has felt like a surprise.

On Soccer Mommy’s fourth album, the tender but resolute Evergreen, Allison is again writing about her life. But that life’s different these days: Since making her previous album, 2022’s Sometimes, Forever, Allison experienced a profound and also very personal loss. New songs emerged from that change, unflinching and sometimes even funny reflections on what she was feeling. (Speaking of funny, this is a Soccer Mommy album, so there’s an ode to Allison’s purple-haired wife in the game Stardew Valley, too.) These songs were, once again, Allison’s way to sort through life, to ground herself. She wanted them to sound that way, too, to feel as true to the demos—raw and relatable, unvarnished and honest—as possible. The songwriting would again lead where the production would follow. Nothing overindulgent, everything real.

Evergreen is the absorbing result, an 11-track seesaw of articulate feeling that suggests Allison is driving you through the streets of her native Nashville, the Tennessee sun bright as she plays you a tape of songs she cut to document those very dark days. Eschewing the experimental production of Sometimes, Forever, Evergreen mirrors that earlier self-made work, but recasts it with a sense of cinematic scale. There’s the beautiful acoustic billow of opener “Lost,” a tormented thesis that still manages to break through the most oppressive clouds. There’s the haze and sway of “Some Sunny Day,” where the promise of reunion is the only palliative for the vertigo of loss. And above the muted jangle of “Dreaming of Falling,” she summons momentary glimpses of madness—waking terrors, sunlight burning the skin, everyday experiences that begin to frame the black hole of forever. “Half of my life is behind me,” she sings, chords wafting like low clouds, “and the other has changed somehow.”

Allison began writing Evergreen without really knowing it. At home between sessions for Sometimes, Forever, she penned “Changes,” an acoustic ballad about what we lose with time, about how even our most familiar and important lodestars will warp, fade, disappear. She set it aside, knowing little about its fate other than it didn’t need the complex electronic textures of what she was then making. But as those sessions ended and she began to write her way through loss, “Changes” seemed like the skeleton key, its mantra of inescapable impermanence putting the rest of the songs into context. Allison most often wrote quickly, verses and choruses piling up after months of contemplating all that had gone missing. A frank glimpse into nostalgia and the troubles it can bring, “Thinking of You” came together in 10 minutes. “How long is too long to be stuck in a memory?” she asks. “Lost,” like many of the songs that follow, didn’t take much more. The goal was always to make snapshots of a moment’s feelings, to portray the sadness or beauty, survival or hope that bobs there in the wake of loss.

Allison assembled Evergreen as she crept into her late 20s, that tenuous time where the travails of adulthood suddenly look much closer than the playground of childhood. And during the three-year span since finishing Sometimes, Forever and beginning Evergreen, Allison learned loss is not a monolith. Some days are brutal and others are beautiful, as you take what you have gained from someone who is no longer here and try to carry it ahead, a talisman for whatever may come. “She cannot fade/She is so evergreen,” Allison sings in the devastating but strangely affirming title finale, strings sighing beneath the brush of her acoustic guitar. It feels like a lucid note to self. And that, after all, is where these songs started—Allison, writing songs for herself that documented what it was she was going through, just as she’s always done.

https://sopharela.bandcamp.com/album/evergreen

+Bored at My Grandma’s House: After making waves with her critically acclaimed debut EP Sometimes I Forget You’re Human Too, Bored at My Grandmas House, AKA Leeds-based Amber Strawbridge, announces her debut album Show & Tell for June 7th via CLUE Records (The Wedding Present, Van Houten, YOWL) / EMI North (Nadine Shah).

Upcoming Love Thy Neighbour shows:
30042025 – Michael Cera Palin. Patterns
30042025 – GNOD & White Hills. Green Door Store.
02052025 – Henge. Concorde 2
02052025 – Penelope Trappes. Alphabet
04052025 – Acid Mothers Temple. The Hope & Ruin
06052025 – Soccer Mommy. Chalk
08052025 – Mekons. Lewes Constitutional Club
11052025 – Rust For Glory play Neil Young. Lewes Constitutional Club
11052025 – Miki Berenyi Trio. Dust
13052025 – Snapped Ankles. The Old Market
16052025 – The Bevis Frond. Lewes Constitutional Club|
22052025 – Lunar Vacation. The Hope & Ruin
23052025 – Atticomatic. Dust
29052025 – Shotgun Jimmie. Folklore Rooms
29052025 – Throwing Muses. Chalk
30052025 – MJ Lenderman. Chalk
31052025 – Oi Va Voi. Patterns
01062025 – Shonen Knife. Concorde 2
06062025 – Willi Carlisle. Alphabet
13062025 – Eva Lunny. The Rose Hill
13062025 – Niamh Regan. Folklore
08072025 – Battlesnake + DZ Deathrays. Chalk
11072025 – Cheekface + Martha. Chalk
01082025 – Chris Cohen. Green Door Store
27082025 – The Burning Hell. Komedia
19092025 – Nic Cage Against The Machine. Patterns
19092025 – Bridhde Chaimbeul. Komedia
20092025 – Warrington Runcorn New Town Development Plan. Dust
27092025 – The Beths. Chalk
13102025 – Welly. Chalk
17102025 – The Utopia Strong. Hope & Ruin
29102025 – Mumble Tide. The Prince Albert
13112025 – The Crazy World of Arthur Brown. Concorde 2
15112025 – Niall McNamee. Alphabet
28112025 – Ozric Tentacles + System 7. Concorde 2

Fully accessible venue, disabled toilet at the back. Ask bar for assistance. Entrance for wheelchairs at the back of the venue. Toilets gender neutral on some nights. If you require a carer at the venue, please contact us at info@lovethyneighbourmusic.co.uk for guestlist, with evidence such as a blue badge or access card. If strobe lighting is an issue or if standing for long periods of time is an issue, please contact us in advance. Wheelchair area, and sofa at the side for seating, but depending on how many people are in it may affect the viewing.

Soccer Mommy Brighton
Soccer Mommy Brighton