Momma Expand ‘Sky’ With Outtakes, Heatmiser Cover

Momma (photo: Avery Norman).

Ascendant rock quartet Momma are expanding their acclaimed latest Polyvinyl album, Welcome to My Blue Sky, on Nov. 14 with four outtakes and a cover of “Christian Brothers” by the late Elliott Smith’s pre-fame band Heatmiser. A head-nodding new single, “Cross Your Heart,” is out now in tandem with a video directed by Prophet Media’s Steph Rinzler.

“We actually were messing around with this one during soundchecks while we were still touring [the 2022 album] Household Name,” band members say of “Cross Your Heart.” “We always knew it had potential but we could never fully crack it, and this was one of the first songs we started working on in the writing process for Welcome to My Blue Sky. It’s about a forbidden romance and sneaking around with another person.”

Rinzler’s video finds band members Etta Friedman, Allegra Weingarten, Aron Kobayashi Ritch and Preston Fulks gallivanting around their adopted hometown of Brooklyn, N.Y. “I wanted to capture Momma in their own world, goofing around, stumbling into moments, and letting the night carry them,” she says. “What unfolds is less of a traditional music video and more of a time capsule of a night out. At its core, this project was about keeping the process as fun and unselfconscious as the band is in real life.”

Two of the other outtakes were recorded live with acoustic guitars (“that was the best way to give them justice,” band members say), while “Christian Brothers” was chosen because it’s a song Friedman and Weingarten “have been covering and playing live since high school.”

Momma begins a short European and U.K. tour Oct. 31 in Brussels and will then play their biggest New York show to date on Nov. 20 at the 1,800-capacity Brooklyn Steel. After their first visits to Japan and Australia early next year, the band will help anchor the Something in the Way festival alongside Sunny Day Real Estate, Explosions in the Sky and the Hotelier from Jan. 31-Feb. 1 in Boston.