Yellow is the Color of Her Eyes

This is a long song — over seven minutes — and it earns every second by refusing to hurry grief. Sophie Allison builds it in waves, starting with clean, almost delicate guitar lines and expanding slowly into something that floods the room. The production on Sometimes, Forever has a soft-focus quality, like peering through glass smeared with moisture, and this track uses that aesthetic deliberately — nothing is sharp, everything is felt rather than seen clearly. Allison's voice is confessional without being fragile; she has always sung like someone who has already accepted the hardest things and is now simply trying to say them out loud. The song is addressed to her mother during serious illness, and it approaches that subject with the kind of oblique tenderness that only works when a writer trusts her imagery enough not to explain it. The yellow of the title becomes a color loaded with specific private meaning — warm and terminal at once. Soccer Mommy had always worked in the tradition of 90s indie rock and singer-songwriter intimacy, but this track reached further, into something more formally ambitious. You would listen to this during a long, aimless drive, or sitting in a hospital waiting room, or anywhere else where you need music that understands that some feelings are too large and too quiet to need amplification.