Share this Post
RM chats with Momma ahead of their Hopscotch set.
If Momma’s 2022 album Household Name turned them into, well, a household name in the indie rock world, then their 2025 record Welcome to My Blue Sky has turned them into a headliner. And that’s exactly where you’ll be able to find them this weekend: Rocking the main stage on Thursday evening at Hopscotch Music Festival.
Brooklynites and bandmates Etta Friedman and Allegra Weingarten have been playing together since 2015, and the band name hasn’t flinched since their SoundCloud days: It’s always been Momma.
“When I was 14, I was trying to make songs in my bedroom and wanted to upload stuff to SoundCloud and online and needed a moniker,” notes Friedman. “So it’s from like 12 years ago and just stuck around.”
Gripping and fuzzy yet cathartic, Momma’s discography has already taken an array of twists and turns of a far more mature project, despite neither Friedman or Weingarten clearing 30 yet. Their enigmatic sound is on purpose—they don’t want to be constrained with the label of a niche genre.
“I feel like the more specific genres get, the less they make sense to me,” Friedman maintains. “[They] get so hyper specific that they don’t even apply to anyone but the band who coined it. When people ask us what kind of music we make, I just say indie rock—as an umbrella term.”
Both Weingarten and Friedman note they were intentional about making Welcome to My Blue Sky something new entirely, rather than a sequel or spinoff to Household Name. Blue Sky leans more gaze-y and aloof, and dives into the notion of falling in love and being launched back out of it.
“Sonically, we just continuously get pigeonholed into this ’90s alt thing, and it’s frustrating because, obviously, that influence is there,” Friedman says. “We actually have so much more, and we’re not just redoing something that already existed.” Influences ebb and flow—hence Momma’s hyper-general “indie-rock” umbrella.
When writing Welcome to My Blue Sky, the foursome was listening to the likes of Hovvdy and other modern music, while Household Name was heavily influenced by “the music we grew up with as teenagers and the music we listened to when we started playing music,” emphasizes Weingarten. Head to Hopscotch to see all of Momma’s twists and turns of juvenile romanticism.
Related Articles
Share this Post