By – Jason Hamric

Welcome to My Blue Sky is a strange kind of  rock record: not made for playlists or metrics or the soulless fucking algorithm —but for people who need music. For the brokenhearted. For the stoned dreamers. For the ones lying on their backs staring at the ceiling, remembering how it felt to be 17 and doomed. It’s a splattered love letter to all the reasons we ever bothered to put our heart all in.

Momma—Etta Friedman and Allegra Weingarten, with multi-instrumentalist Aron Kobayashi Ritch and drummer Preston Fulks—aren’t interested in reinventing the wheel. What they’re doing is putting it back on the goddamn car, hitting the gas, and racing directly into the sun with nothing but fuzz pedals, guilt, and a vague notion of closure.

“Sincerely” opens the album with a deceptively clean strum, like a diary note written on a lunch napkin, right before it explodes into mid-’90s alt-rock glory. Then there’s “I Want You (Fever),” which could’ve lived on the Empire Records soundtrack in another lifetime. But it’s more than nostalgia cosplay—it’s desire with teeth. When they sing “Pick up and leave her, I want you, fever,” it’s not just a hook—it’s a slashing live wire.And “Rodeo”? That one’s a gut-punch masquerading as a banger. It flips the lens, written from the perspective of the people they hurt. The video’s got a skater chased by a mechanical bull, which is either a metaphor for emotional consequences or just a glorious mess of symbolism and humor. Either way, it s great!The record’s most quietly devastating moment is “How to Breathe,” Friedman’s first openly queer song, a soft-focus sigh written for her girlfriend. It’s not a grand gesture—it’s an intimate one. A window cracked open just enough to let the light slip in and cut across the room. In fact, this whole album feels like that: not really a scream, but a release.Production-wise, it’s tight without feeling over-cooked. The guitars are fuzzy but melodic, the drums heavy but human. “Bottle Blonde” is tripped-out, slathered in filter sweeps and breakbeats like some indie rock Radiohead fever dream. “My Old Street” closes the album with heartland emo vibes—longing, family, home.

What makes Welcome to My Blue Sky feel essential is that it doesn’t pretend to have answers. It’s messy and sad and weird and loud. It understands that growing up doesn’t mean healing cleanly—it means learning to live with the scar.