Soccer Mommy turned down the noise. She needs you to hear these words.

NASHVILLE

When Sophie Allison walks into one of Nashville’s oldest burger joints on a bright October afternoon, she is recognized immediately.

The 27-year-old singer-songwriter, who performs as Soccer Mommy, is no stranger to this symptom of fame. It has become commonplace in the years since 2018, when she burst onto the music scene with a critically acclaimed debut album that seemed to herald a new era of women-led indie rock.

This time it’s not a fan who approaches her. It’s a gray-mulleted waitress who has worked at the wood-paneled diner for 35 years. She hasn’t seen Allison in a while, she says, but Allison’s dad was just in.

The musician is hunkered down in her hometown, an eye-of-the-storm period between hectic promotional trips to New York, London and Los Angeles, as she braces for the release of her fourth album, “Evergreen.” It’s her most intimate work yet, both sonically and emotionally, created in the wake of a profound personal loss. She doesn’t yet know how it will feel to offer listeners a window into her grief.

Most people don’t know that Allison is from Nashville. Her indie-rock stardom blossomed in New York, but its roots are in Music City, just a few miles west of the sloshy bachelorette party buses and honky-tonks lining Broadway. Despite her internet-cool-girl vibe — black cat-eye liner, a bleach-blond face frame, constellations of tattoos — she looks right at home eating a cheeseburger in this century-old dive. That’s because she is: She’s been coming here since she was a kid.

Her family moved to Nashville from Zurich when Allison was a year old. The middle child of a neuroscientist and an elementary school teacher, she grew up a few miles down the road from Vanderbilt University, where her dad still operates a lab. By age 5, she was the proud owner of a toy guitar signed by Riders in the Sky and was writing songs with titles such as “What the Heck is a Cowgirl?”

Since then, making music has been a constant in her life: “It’s like breathing,” she says. “It’s like thinking. It’s just a natural part of how I operate.” Nonetheless, by the time Allison enrolled in a Nashville performing arts high school, she had all but given up on the dream of being a professional musician. Not because of the art — she’d keep writing forever, fame or not — but because of the demands of self-promotion.

“I’m not that person who wants to sell myself to people,” she remembers thinking. “That stuff is so unnatural to me.”

Besides, what were the odds of her aspirations actually panning out? So she made a practical decision. She was supposed to go to college, and off to New York University she went. But first, she uploaded the earliest lo-fi Soccer Mommy songs to Bandcamp, pulling the name from an old Twitter handle.

As a sophomore, Allison chose a music business program, though by then her real-world experience outpaced what she was learning in her classes; with moderate Bandcamp success, she was playing shows around the city, albeit often on weeknights to audiences of fewer than 10.

“I was having to go do those things I was saying were so awful,” she says, picking at her fries. “I wasn’t aggressive about it. I just can’t manage to do that. But going to a show and trying to be a part of the music scene in a new place is so awkward.”

Even so, Allison’s career began to come together. First there was another EP (this time on a label), then a break from school for a self-funded tour with friends out of her Subaru Outback. By the time her debut full-length album, “Clean,” came out in 2018 — lauded by Pitchfork, the New York Times and others as among the best releases of the year — it became clear that the hiatus would become permanent. She moved back to Nashville, but most of her time was spent crisscrossing the country. More people started to know her as Soccer Mommy than as Sophie.

The next two years brought tremendous highs, such as tours with her musical inspirations, Paramore and Liz Phair. But the lows, such as her mental health struggles and her mother’s terminal illness, both of which she documented on her sophomore album, “Color Theory,” made for a difficult period. Strangely, the pandemic — a forced break — provided a respite. She also started therapy and left social media.

Since then, Allison has been trying to be more proactive about making time to take care of herself. But, as she’s quick to note, that’s not always compatible with her job. “That’s not actually how mental health works,” she says. “You can’t just push, push, push, push and be like, ‘I’ll do this for six months and then I’ll have a break.’ It’s not quite how it works for me.”

At the same time, she worries that missing performances, interviews, posting on social media — chances for fans to feel closer to the artist behind Soccer Mommy — will affect her career. “There are people who are willing to go, go, go until it kills them,” she says. “And how can you compete with that?”

We take Allison’s car, a Toyota Venza with a “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” bumper sticker, a few tree-lined blocks to a coffee shop she frequented in high school. Her phone number is still written on the wall somewhere, she says, and she still occasionally gets calls and texts from people who see it there. We’re only a couple of streets from the house she grew up in. But for the past two years, she has owned a place some miles northeast of here with her guitarist and long-term boyfriend, Julian Powell.

He was the inspiration for “Evergreen’s” one love song, an excursion to a pop-y landscape about the comfort of having someone levelheaded to pull you back on course. “Losing my concentration on every whim/ He reminds me, he leads me back like it’s nothing to him,” she sings over an electric-guitar-fueled groove. It’s based on Allison’s real-life driving skills; last night, she says, she dead-stopped at a flashing yellow to catch a glimpse of Jupiter in the night sky before Powell prodded her along.

Besides “Driver,” the only other off-theme track on the album is “Abigail,” written for a character in the video game “Stardew Valley” during a bout of writer’s block. She initially debated whether these outliers would feel too out of place on an album she strove to keep sonically and lyrically consistent. (The other nine songs all center on the loss Allison experienced in 2022.)

“Evergreen” is the antithesis of Allison’s last album, “Sometimes, Forever.” Bold, experimental and ominous, the 2022 record was gothic horror in a bottle, its ghost stories heightened by heavy production. By contrast, “Evergreen” is earnest and raw, with production that centers Allison’s voice. “It felt like when I was 17, just wanting to write these songs that I could imagine playing to people stripped back and solo entirely,” she says. “I had that feeling again, and I wanted to chase it a little bit.”

She did that with help from producer Ben H. Allen III (Bombay Bicycle Club; Belle and Sebastian) at his studio in Atlanta. Allen is well-versed in ’90s records, and he says that his first listens to Allison’s earlier music reminded him of bands he felt connected to as a teenager. He wanted to work with her because of the cool psychedelia of “Sometimes, Forever,” but he knew “Evergreen” would require a different approach.

“My conversation with Sophie was like, ‘I want this album to feel like your voice is always right in the listener’s ear, like you’re telling them a story and they’re sitting in the room with you,’” Allen says.

And it does. “I could look back but it’s not the same,” Allison sings in a line late in the album. “I see from the shadows now/ Half of my life is behind me, and the other has changed somehow.” It’s a stark notion from someone barely in their late 20s. But it’s also a thesis of sorts to “Evergreen,” which portrays, in distinctly different ways, the gutting sensation of waking up one morning in a different life than the one you fell asleep in.

She suspected from the first notes she wrote of “Evergreen” what the album might be about. She also realized that there would be an inherent tension in creating a public artwork about private emotions. “I didn’t want to turn this thing into a commodity, you know?” she says. We’re sitting at a picnic table in the park where she used to drink with the other neighborhood kids. The park where she met Powell. Afternoon sunlight streams through changing leaves. “I just wanted to make it however I wanted to make it.”

Part of that meant exploring the ways in which grief is never just a single emotion. There are songs like “Anchor” — set amid a shipwreck, sailors drowning to an eerie groove — that capture the creeping loneliness of loss. There are also hopeful tracks, such as “Some Sunny Day.” “I’ll see your face painted in a summertime that won’t fade when I close my eyes,” she promises over a folksy jangle.

The thread between the songs, disparate as they are, is the idea that the people we love are never really gone, and that we should embrace the remnants of their presence in our lives. “It’s such a sad idea to let something become this awful reminder that you don’t want to think about and don’t want to face,” she says.

Even as she prepares to release “Evergreen’s” songs into the world and perform them on tour, Allison wants to keep this particular loss close. “It really is better if it’s not this story where people know this exact thing about this,” she says. “If it’s more open-ended, it’s something you can feel for yourself.”