“Let’s tell all of our friends that we’re making a mess,” Allegra Weingarten and Etta Friedman sing in tandem on “Stay All Summer”. With the warm weather season fast approaching, you can almost feel it: you’re about to get spun up in its strange habit of inviting a flurry of reckless fun, crash outs, and epiphanic realization bullshit your way, head on. That said, it might be an opportune time to join Momma in on the action. On their highly emotively-charged grunge-pop post-mortem that is their career-peak, Welcome to My Blue Sky, they’re taking stock of mistakes and learnings this road called life (and touring) has dealt their way so that when the shit hits the cooling fan, you’ll feel like you’re in good company with whichever direction you’re being pulled into.

The band, led by Brooklynite besties , have never shied away from embracing that aforementioned mess, be it relationships, romantic and platonic, or any of the matters that come with adulting. Growing pains have been at the epicenter of every effort they’ve released since embarking on the search for their authentic selves in the spoils of suburbia throughout the indie rock introspections of 2018’s Interloper and 2020’s Two of Me before slamming into the living room loudly with their 2022 breakthrough, Household Name. On their fourth full-length, it very much feels like they’re not just in control of the turbulence, but deep diving further into sky to widen the lens of how to set it all into sound.

That view amounts to some of the more flawless examples of recent distortion-crushed songwriting that drench you with the last splashes of ‘of ’90s indie rock, perpetually youthful Midwestern emo euphoria, and hooked-up shoegaze. Yet, it sticks around with a bittersweet lust for life nostalgia about exes, places, friends, and family member’s faces they can still see clearly in the rearview. The words around them of course matter, but what’s really striking in the air they whirl around in is how Weingarten and Friedman assign an energy to each piece of it that captures a moment in a perfectly shaped time capsule of sound.

Standout singles like “I Want You (Fever)” and “Ohio All The Time” are a temperature-rising dizzy of lust, while “Rodeo” spins in and out, attempting to wrangle back in a love who they’ve long lost the reigns on. Their bold look on alternative guitar-pop sound maturely godly on “Bottle Blonde”, and the much-needed exhale of “How to Breathe” sweeps up the sunrise even at a slower pace. Eventually, all that wistfulness leads them home on the album’s last anthem, “My Old Street”. “I miss it, but I’ve moved on,” goes one line. In a sense, that old home probably feels like a vacation home for less heavier memories to Momma at the rate at which grown-up life is coming at them. Still, they can’t stay there forever, so they may as well make the best of the mess.

Recommended: “I Want You (Fever)”, “Rodeo”, “Stay All Summer”

Momma’s Welcome to My Blue Sky is available now on Polyvinyl Records / Lucky Number.

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