Momma Tickets at The Workmans Club

Like so many coming-of-age stories that leave a long-lasting impact, Momma’s 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' was 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). “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.

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.