POP/ROCK

Soccer Mommy, "Sometimes, Forever" (Loma Vista)

"I don't know how to feel things small," Sophie Allison, the songwriter behind Soccer Mommy, sings in "Still," which closes her third studio album. "It's a tidal wave or nothing at all."

With each album, she has expanded the ways she conjures those tidal waves. Allison, 25, started releasing home-recorded Soccer Mommy songs on Bandcamp as a teenager, and she landed a record contract in 2017 based on her college dorm-room recordings.

She formed a band and toured extensively, and on her studio albums "Clean" (2018) and "Color Theory" (2020), she confidently tapped a legacy of guitar-driven 1990s indie rock. Her tunes maintained an old-fashioned clarity, even as her lyrics determinedly exposed her fears, depression and self-destructive impulses.

The same struggles run through "Sometimes, Forever," pushing toward new extremes of misery and (possibly delusional) rapture. Even a seemingly happy situation holds ominous undertones. "Shotgun" is the album's poppiest song. Its verse rides a grungy bass line as Soccer Mommy recalls "coffee and menthol on your breath" and problems with drugs. But she realizes, "This feels the same without the bad things," leading into a chorus that promises "Whenever you want me I'll be around."

Soccer Mommy writes orderly tunes. Her melodies often rise and fall symmetrically and her singing stays levelheaded, almost reserved. But she chose a chaos agent as her producer — Daniel Lopatin. Here he used reverb, distortion, synthesizer tones and guitar feedback, at every volume level from subliminal to overpowering, to create backdrops from sumptuous to menacing.

Throughout the album, Soccer Mommy staves off despair with musical craftsmanship. In the ballad "Newdemo," she sings about impending storms and destruction, but the music ascends into a glimmering psychedelic wonderland. Wistfully, warily, she observes, "What is a dream but a hope you hold onto?/A lie that you wish would come true." She doesn't expect it to last, but for the moment, she's singing.

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