“So if you don’t like it, it’s just been a waste of two years of my life,” the young singer songwriter Soccer Mommy told the group of some 250 people, assembled in a church in Ridgewood. Sophia Allison, almost a decade into a career straddling the limits of fuzzy guitar indie pop, was playing her first show in half a year. She was playing, this time, from inside a cavern of fir trees, illuminated by miniature, battery-powered candles, while sitting on a wooden stool. She remained seated for the entire hour, like Joni Mitchell at the Grammy’s. To the crowd, she announced that she’s been recording a new bag of songs, a follow up to her 2022 album “Sometimes, Forever,” an effort that brought her to more Spotify playlists and debuts on places like the “Tonight Show.”  

The new material had an earnest grunge-pop sensibility, not unlike her earlier bedroom-recorded material, plunging forward with names like “Salt and Wound” and “Driver,” and “Lost.” Landscapes of everyday angst, the small ways that days feel bitter. The direction on these newer tracks reminded me of the grunge minimalism of her contemporary Alicia Bognanno, another Nashville singer-songwriter, who records as “Bully.” The two did a song together last year, as it happens.

Hearing the pleasant folk-pop debut of “Evergreen,” inside the recently- renovated Ridgewood Presbyterian Church felt fitting too. It was an earnestly DIY spot, not unlike the places she started out in the decade before. These days, the church hosts everything from band rehearsals to speeches by the excommunicated “Father Anne,” a leading figure in the move, so far unsuccessful, to get the Catholic Church to recognize woman priests. It was not hard to imagine Allison in this earnest linage, nevertheless.