Love Thy NeighbourLive Music | Artist Management | Record Label
Love Thy Neighbour
Soccer Mommy Brighton
Soccer Mommy live in Brighton at CHALK on 6th May 2025!
Get tickets from 10am Friday 13th September above, or from SeeTickets.
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).
The title track is out now with the reveal of the record – following late 2023 release ‘Inhibitions’. Reminiscent of artists like Soccer Mommy, Snail Mail, and Alvvays, ‘Show & Tell’ is a breezy track which meets at the intersection between dream-pop, bedroom-pop and shoegaze, the sprightly guitar work echoing the droll lyrics and themes. It’s a hooky song which lays bare difficulties with trust, and building walls for self-protection. As Amber explains:
“Show & Tell is quite a tongue-in-cheek song about me being the opposite of an open book and all the little specific things about me that I sometimes wish were different. Overall it’s about me being a guarded person and fearing the possibility of having to be vulnerable and realising that vulnerability is actually a beautiful thing and something i shouldn’t be so scared of.”
On her debut album, Amber explores a broad range of heavy topics including anxiety, friendship, introspection, love, human greed, mental health, loss and empathy (or a lack of it) in the world. Despite the breadth of themes covered, each track deals with the weight of the subject with real conviction, while not losing any of Amber’s trademark pop sensibilities. She elaborates a little more on the thematic process:
Upcoming Love Thy Neighbour shows:
12092024 – Tunic. The Prince Albert
13092024 – Uzumaki. The Hope & Ruin
14092024 – Mary Lattimore. West Hill Hall
17092024 – Me Lost Me. The Prince Albert
22092024 – Charlie Parr. Lewes Constitutional Club
24092024 – Battlesnake. Dust
24092024 – Eades. The Hope & Ruin
26092024 – Melt Banana. Concorde 2
26092024 – Mermaid Chunky. Green Door Store
26092024 – Welly. Lewes Con Club
27092024 – Prolapse. Lewes Con Club
28092024 – Los Campesinos! Chalk
03102024 – Twen. The Hope & Ruin
05102024 – Parsnip. Komedia Studio
06102024 – Loose Articles. The Hope & Ruin
08102024 – The Howlers. The Prince Albert
10102024 – Balderdasch. The Hope & Ruin
13102024 – Skating Polly. Green Door Store
13102024 – Frankie Archer. Komedia Studio
19102024 – Maruja. The Hope & Ruin
23102024 – Benefits. The Hope & Ruin
24102024 – Junior Brother. The Prince Albert
24102024 – The Tom Robinson Band. Concorde 2
25102024 – DZ Deathrays. Green Door Store
26102024 – Old Sea Brigade. Dust
26102024 – Man & The Echo. Alphabet
27102024 – Art Brut. Concorde 2
03112024 – John Francis Flynn. Lewes Constitutional Club
05110224 – Dame Area. The Hope & Ruin
06112024 – Lack of Afro. Patterns.
18112024 – Piglet. The Prince Albert
20112024 – Andy Irvine. Lewes Con Club
21112024 – Alasdair Roberts & Donald WG Lindsay. Komedia
22112024 – Getdown Services. Hope & Ruin
23112024 – The Orb + Ozric Tentacles. Chalk
23112024 – Desperate Journalist. Dust
24112024 – Shovel Dance Collective. Lewes Constitutional Club
30112024 – Porridge Radio. Chalk
02122024 – Victory Lap. The Hope & Ruin
05122024 – Blood Wizard. Green Door Store
07122024 – John Otway & his band. Lewes Constitutional Club
08122024 – Stick in the Wheel. Lewes Constitutional Club
11122024 – Hollow Hand. The Hope & Ruin
13122024 – Dub Pistols. Concorde 2
22012025 – Jim Moray. Komedia Studio
22022025 – She Drew The Gun. Revenge
01032025 – Personal Trainer. Chalk.
06052025 – Soccer Mommy. Chalk
30052025 – MJ Lenderman. Chalk
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