Memorable autobiographies usually decide to one in all two routes: recount a real-life expertise with the intrigue of a gripping plot, or preserve the main points imprecise in favor of evoking sturdy shared emotions as an alternative. On their fourth album, Brooklyn alt-rock band Momma revisit a life-changing stretch of their 2022 tour in a method that’s personally cathartic for co-founders Allegra Weingarten and Etta Friedman, whereas providing sentimental universality for the remainder of us. Whether or not they’ve blurred the main points to guard themselves or simply imagine that simplified truths beget extra highly effective lyrics, Momma are scaling again on specifics whereas scaling up in sound. That makes Welcome to My Blue Sky’s barreling fuzzball of grunge-pop all of the extra putting.
Mining moments from the top of their early 20s, Weingarten and Friedman relate a shared memoir rife with coming-of-age allure and self-doubt. Nostalgia for youth is the entire level, even should you didn’t have a childhood value remembering fondly. Who cares if June via August has lengthy since stopped representing whole freedom? With “Keep All Summer season,” Momma unfurl a wall calendar the place the numerical days imply nothing. It doesn’t matter should you’re proudly single or should you’ve had a hoop in your finger so lengthy that it’s shaped a everlasting indent; when the duo sing about attempting to keep up a stiff higher lip after heartbreak on “New Good friend,” the best way their voices morph from ache into bittersweet confidence summons a well-recognized empathy. “My Outdated Road” demonstrates that Weingarten and Friedman are conversant with quite a few kinds of longing: “Mother was getting drunker/And she or he’s speaking like she’s youthful/She informed me that she missed out on her goals/And we each miss sixteen.” That pining—for what as soon as was, what may’ve been—is common, even once we can’t fairly put our finger on what, precisely, we miss.
As with 2022’s Family Title, the place layers of guitar and vocal harmonies thickened the alt-pop slurry, Welcome to My Blue Sky is a finely tuned manufacturing that warrants textural comparisons to crushed velvet or classic corduroy. Produced by Momma bassist Aron Kobayashi Ritch, the album harkens again to when ’90s alt-rock radio stations chased power-pop choruses with a wink (“Bottle Blonde”) and paired heady grunge fuzz with a rebellious spirit (“Rodeo”). Singles like “Ohio All of the Time” are full-volume affairs finest heard in a automobile with the home windows rolled down, subwoofer rattling obnoxiously, hand prolonged to the wind. Whereas the revving engine isn’t included (this time), Momma know that young-adult turbulence sounds finest via crunchy guitars that Courtney Love would co-sign, or the marginally warped acoustic strums within the title monitor that may very well be lifted from Ashlee Simpson’s Autobiography.