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Premiere: Watch an 8-bit Soccer Mommy perform ‘crawling in my skin’ in the Minneapolis skyway

by Caleb Brennan

May 07, 2020

Prior to the cancellation of her 2020 tour, Sophie Allison, a.k.a. Soccer Mommy, was ready to hit the road and promote her latest record, color theory. To make it up to her fans, the 22-year-old singer-songwriter has been trying to provide performances and content across a variety of digital platforms.

The Nashville-based artist has remained very active as the entire music industry holds as a standstill. Notably, Allison did a livestream performance on the Club Penguin Rewritten platform, a remake of the popular late-00s multiplayer game of the same name; the event was so popular that it crashed the server after over 10,000 members joined the stream. She also dropped her own Zoom backgrounds.

Now, the band are releasing a slew of music videos designed by the digital artist Bella Clark. Clark places Allison and her band in the various cities she was planning on visiting via her tour: Minneapolis, Chicago, Toronto, and Austin. The twist is that Soccer Mommy is recreated in 8-bit pixels, allowing the band to jam out in Atari-style models of the Minneapolis skyway, a spooky Chicago hotel, and a decrepit Toronto subway station.

In the Minneapolis version, the band are caught in the middle of a hectic rush hour; shadowy, pixelated commuters scurry about the skyway as the band “performs” the song “crawling in my skin.”

"We wanted to find something off beat, and Minneapolis having skyways is just so cool!" said Clark. "It was kind of a playful creative process."

“It’s really hard having our tour be postponed because I was really excited to play all of the songs on color theory for everyone, ‘crawling in my skin’ in particular,” said Allison. “I hope this little 8-bit performance can hold everyone over until the tour can happen.”

If you want to join Soccer Mommy on her "8-Bit Tour," you can catch the band performing in Chicago; Seattle; Toronto; and Austin, Texas.

Clean Water Land & Legacy Amendment
This activity is made possible in part by the Minnesota Legacy Amendment’s Arts & Cultural Heritage Fund.