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Like so many coming-of-age stories that leave a long-lasting impact, Momma’s new album Welcome to My Blue Sky takes place during a charmed and turbulent summer—a transformative moment in time that co-founders Etta Friedman and Allegra Weingarten sum up as a period of “parallel chaos.” The Brooklyn-based band’s fourth LP, over the course of 12 immaculately composed yet immediately potent songs, documents all the life-altering upheaval the two singer/songwriter/guitarists experienced during a whirlwind mid-2022 tour. Equal parts shared memoir, communal outpouring, and riveting emotional travelogue, each track is infused with both unsparing self-awareness and immense sensitivity, and the result is a bold leap forward for one of the most creatively uncompromising and singular voices in indie-rock.

“This record came from a very formative time for us—there was a lot of change that felt so fun and exciting, but also a lot of instability and heartbreak,” says Weingarten, who met Friedman during their high-school years in L.A. and soon struck up a close musical collaboration. As they dealt with the fallout of that phase of their lives (a moment marked by infidelity, loneliness, heavy drinking, and the start of new romance), the two friends made a pact to wade through the mess together. “In a way it felt like we flipped our entire lives upside-down,” says Friedman. “We needed to lean on each other to cope with everything we were going through, and writing songs together was a big part of working through those feelings and finally putting them to rest.”

Welcome to My Blue Sky, produced by their bandmate Aron Kobayashi Ritch, marks the follow-up to Household Name—a 2022 release that earned acclaim from the likes of Pitchfork, NYLON, NME, and Rolling Stone (including landing on Rob Sheffield’s “Top 20 Albums of 2022” list). In creating their most autobiographical and exactingly realized work to date, Friedman and Weingarten wrote most of the album together on acoustic guitars before sharing those songs with Kobayashi Ritch. The multi-instrumentalist/engineer then guided the band through a highly methodical demoing process aimed at elevating their sound (or, as the band puts it, “setting a new standard for ourselves”) while harnessing the infectious energy they’ve shown in touring with seminal bands like Death Cab For Cutie and Weezer, and performing at major festivals like Coachella. With the help of drummer Preston Fulks, Momma arrived at an album matching the raw urgency of rock with the sticky melodies and taut arrangements of pop—a dynamic born from their deepened commitment to finding the most direct vessel for their emotional expression. “With this album we were less concerned with sounding cool and heavy and rock & roll and much more focused on good, clean songwriting that hopefully inspires people to sing along and mean every word,” Weingarten reveals.

One of the first songs completed for Welcome to My Blue Sky, “I Want You (Fever)” served as an essential breakthrough in shaping the album’s viscerally charged, inventive, and detailed sound. “I remember us writing that in my bedroom and coming up with a riff for the pre-chorus, and then deciding to sing that part instead of playing it on guitar—which felt so fun and fresh and took the song in a whole new direction,” Friedman recalls. “I Want You (Fever),” with its frenetic textures and hypnotic chorus, soon evolved into a fantastically loopy portrait of forbidden love. “When we were recording that song I felt such an intense joy that I couldn’t stop smiling,” says Weingarten. “It felt completely authentic to Momma, but also like stepping into a whole new era.”

Mainly recorded live with the full band at Studio G in Brooklyn, Welcome to My Blue Sky takes its title from a gorgeous, sprawling track embodying a far more wistful mood, where Momma’s tender introspection is adorned with bittersweet strings and graceful acoustic-guitar work. “We were on tour and stopped at a gas station and saw a sign that said ‘Welcome to My Blue Sky,’ which hit me as really poetic—although it turned out to be an ad for an oil company,” Weingarten explains. “We got to the venue and wrote that song so quickly, and it ended up being about the experience of going on tour and leaving people behind, and all the unknowns as far as what the future holds for us.” 

Referring to Welcome to My Blue Sky as “an open letter to those who have come in and out of our lives,” across the album Momma explores the full spectrum of their emotional experience during that summer 2022 tour. On “Ohio All The Time,” the band slips into a lovely nostalgia as they reminisce about a fleeting moment Friedman likens to “living in our own little dream world,” imbuing the track with all the punchy effervescence of early-aughts alt-pop.  “Rodeo” is written from the perspective of their former romantic partners, offering up a heavy-hearted anthem channeling both frustration and longing—a tension perfectly echoed in its pummeling riffs, staccato drum beats, and indelibly sweet vocal delivery. “There was a lot of infidelity that happened on that tour, and we wrote ‘Rodeo’ as a way to process that and own up to how we might have made other people feel,” Friedman points out. Meanwhile, on “Bottle Blonde,” Momma brings moody breakbeats and lush synth loops to an intimate meditation on the complexities of their friendship. “That song is partly us talking to our younger selves and telling them everything’s going to be okay, but it’s also us talking to each other right now,” says Weingarten. “It’s saying that even if our relationship ebbs and flows, we know that we’ll always be each other’s anchors no matter what we go through.”

For the bookends to Welcome to My Blue Sky, Momma selected two songs that took them far beyond their comfort zone: the album-opening “Sincerely” (a free-flowing, acoustic-guitar-driven piece conceived as a farewell to their former lives) and fuzzed-out closing track “My Old Street” (a brutally honest look back at their childhoods). “I’m still really nervous for certain people in my life to hear these songs; they all have a level of vulnerability that feels pretty scary,” says Weingarten in reflecting on the latter. But in their dedication to, in Friedman’s words, “learning how to confess the hard things,” Momma hopes to inspire others to make peace with the messiest and most uncomfortable truths of their personal experience—and, in turn, head into the wild unknown of their own blue sky with confidence, curiosity, and self-compassion.