Summer is a drug. The seemingly endless days have an inebriating, almost delirious effect where, when it comes, you feel like anything and everything is possible.
It was the summer of 2022 that proved to be life-changing for Etta Friedman and Allegra Weingarten, the two songwriters of the Brooklyn-based rock band Momma, as they emerged from the warm months with their worlds irrevocably altered. “The both of us have gone through so much crazy shit these last three years,” Friedman says when I meet the pair on a cold, mid-February evening. They’ve chosen The Seneca, a neighborhood favorite bar in Ridgewood, Queens. “As people, we’ve made life decisions that have been so wonderful. They’ve affected the rest of our lives.”
In 2022, the pair broke out with Household Name, a record that largely centered around the glorification of the rockstar and the archetypes of such a trope. Their style of pop songs masquerading as ’90s slacker anthems earned comparisons to Veruca Salt, Smashing Pumpkins, and The Breeders. It allowed the band to embark on their first official headline tour in 2022, and by next summer, they were opening for Weezer on their stadium jaunt across North America. But throughout the whirlwind highs, Friedman and Weingarten’s personal lives drastically changed: The two broke up with their respective partners, moved into new apartments in New York City, and welcomed new romance.
Their new album, Welcome To My Blue Sky, out on April 4, is a document of that metamorphosis and their lessons learned through growing pains, a love letter to getting older and the relationships that actually last, soundtracked by grunged-out guitars, hooky pop melodies, and a whole lot of distortion. Songs like “Rodeo” and “I Want You (Fever)” nod to life-altering romantic upheaval and its ensuing chaos, but it’s Friedman and Weingarten’s friendship that serves as the core for the record — and the band. “Our relationship is one of the most important things in my life,” Friedman says.
“We don’t have to sound like the ’90s grunge band everyone thinks we are.”
Friedman and Weingarten, who celebrate a decade of friendship this year, met as high schoolers in their native Los Angeles. Bonded by a shared love of Pavement and Alex G, the duo were signed to Polyvinyl in 2021 after being cold-emailed by the record label. Friedman and Weingarten write Momma’s songs together on acoustic guitars before bringing demos to producer and bassist Aron Kobayashi Ritch and drummer Preston Fulks. But before then, they’ll spend hours talking through an experience, offering their thoughts, recollections, and sides to the narrative. While making Welcome To My Blue Sky, the pair uncannily each went through similar encounters in deciding to end their years-long relationships on different timelines. The conversations that followed served as a form of catharsis, a way to process an experience with the help of your closest confidant, bridging the gaps in both memory and feeling.
“We finish each other’s sentences,” Weingarten says of their writing process. “Etta will be writing a lyric and I’d be like, this is the word that you’re looking for. And it’s not just the word that would be working for the song, but the word that expresses how I’m feeling in the moment. We’re always on the same wavelength.”
The record’s title, Welcome To My Blue Sky, is taken from a gas station sign — “you know, those ones with the changing letters” — that Weingarten spotted while they were on tour with Weezer in Alabama in 2023. There is something infinite about the endlessness of a blue sky in its most obvious terms, but for the band, the message felt like an accurate representation of their rapidly changing young lives, and reckoning with a fast-moving, unknown future. “You feel very independent and very lonely at the same time,” Weingarten says of their time touring. Driving across the highways and big, open spaces of America provoked questions of how their lives had changed since Household Name, and the sign seemed to deliver an answer: “The idea of being alone and being on your own and holding it in as an outside experience.”
Seeing the gas station sign in Alabama, nearly a year after first embarking on the tour, acted as a culmination of this period of unrest as the rest of the record dives into the hedonism that occurred during that fateful summer of 2022; each of their relationships dissolved as they both got caught in complicated love affairs that upended their lives back home. “We were both little heartbreakers,” Weingarten says, matter-of-factly. “That was a really big lesson coming out of the first big tour, where I felt like I had completely flipped my life upside down while I was gone, and coming back to something that is not what it was when I left.”
Their recollection of that time can be heard on “I Want You (Fever),” a song that’s unapologetic about want and desire — where nothing is taboo. Describing the feeling of longing you have for a person who might already have a partner, the chorus is simple, and instructional: “Pick up and leave her, I want you, fever.” This song, says the band, was the key that unlocked the writing process for the rest of the album.
“‘Fever’ happened. And it was, like, ‘Whoa,’” Weingarten says. “Pretty much everything we wrote after that, we were like, ‘Does this have the same effect that we felt when we wrote ‘Fever’ right now?’” It marked a new sound for the band, one that merged their signature noisy rock with more dreamy earworm-y pop melodies made for blasting loudly as you’re driving down freeways, wind in your hair. “Like, we don’t have to sound like the ’90s grunge band everyone thinks we are.”
The thrills of a new romance and the anarchy of infidelity make up the bulk of the record. “Rodeo” is written in the perspective of the duo’s ex-partners, a self-aware attempt to take accountability; the nu-metal “Last Kiss” is an angsty snarl directed at a former lover; “New Friend” and “Stay All Summer” describe the intoxicating pull of a summer stranger, and the unyielding temptation of throwing everything away for one person, including the life you’ve shared with another. “Can we cut to the part when we say how we feel / It was really getting old, building a house / And there’s someone at home that I forgot about,” goes the latter. According to Friedman, writing that song was the most connected they felt sharing an experience.
“Those four lines, to me, were that perfect encapsulation of exactly what the both of us were going through on our own separate journeys of just being like, ‘I think we need a big change right now,’” they say.
For Friedman, the summer that ushered in new romance was also what ultimately gave them the confidence to come out as gay to their family. They’d always had a close relationship so even though Friedman knew their declaration would be met with acceptance, it was about finding the right time, and partner, to support them. They’ve now been dating their current girlfriend — who they met on tour — for the past two years, and Friedman penned “How To Breathe” about their relationship, the sole outright love song on Welcome to My Blue Sky. Tender and affectionate, it describes their romance as safe and cherished, a declaration of gratitude to the person who makes you comfortable to be your true self.
“It’s about being able to step into… not a new version of myself, cause it’s something I’ve always identified with, but just more so being honest about it to the people around me and also myself,” Friedman says.
“I don’t really know what else to say,” they continue, shy for the first time in our conversation. “I met someone who made me show all of myself to my family in a way that I did not think was ever going to happen.” So here’s to summer and eternal blue skies.