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.”