“Bones”

“Bones,” the third single off Soccer Mommy’s upcoming Oneohtrix Point Never–produced album Sometimes, Forever, pulls us into Sophie Allison’s slow-burning heartbreak. “I feel the bones of how we used to be,” Allison murmurs, reflecting on the tacit unraveling of a relationship. By the end of the song, scuzzy ’90s guitars and gentle drums creep slowly into screeching, blown-out hysterics. And when they finally ebb away, we are taken right back to the calm of its beginning, reminding us of how things once were.

Self-doubt is a hallmark of the Soccer Mommy oeuvre, but it’s the genuine regret in this song that renders it so heartbreaking. “I’ve bled you out and patched you up again/Far too much to call it love,” she admits, wondering what could possibly be wrong “with all of the ways I am.” And still, it’s not clear who’s in the wrong–it may be no one at all. Hurt goes noticed, but unspoken. “I wanna scream when you don’t look at me,” she sings with palpable resignation. She knows the end is coming, and as the last lines of the song–“I’m trying to be someone/That you could love and understand/But I know that I’m not”–bleed into its distorted crescendo, we sense it too. The guitars suddenly hush, and we’re left with nothing but a haunting emptiness.