The last time the world heard from Sharon Van Etten, it was 2022. She was pictured on the cover of her sixth album, We’ve Been Going About This All Wrong, standing in front of a house while wildfires raged worryingly close by. The songs lurking inside were informed not just by the environmental catastrophe unfolding on her doorstep, but the “collective trauma” of lockdown and the fraught complexities of parenthood. It was well reviewed and sold enough to dent the charts in several countries: business as usual for a perennially acclaimed and influential singer-songwriter. Perhaps too usual.
Over the course of her career, Van Etten has gradually bolstered and rounded out her sound, from the austere acoustic confessionals of her 2009 debut, via trebly Velvet Underground-ish indie, to something noticeably bigger and smoother, a tasteful – but not bland – take on widescreen alt-rock: mid-paced, stately, buoyed by synths and swelling choruses. For all the strength of its songwriting, there wasn’t much on We’ve Been Going About This All Wrong that her fans wouldn’t have heard before. The laudatory reviews contained adjectives that, viewed in a certain light, could take on a faintly troubling tone: “comfortable”, “tried-and-true”, “familiar”.
Of course, no artist is under any obligation to alter their approach, particularly in the 21st century: in an era of streaming and algorithms predicated on more of the same, there’s doubtless something to be said for maintaining a recognisable brand in a crowded marketplace. But clearly something has prodded Van Etten into a rethink. An act of “total collaboration” from an artist previously thought of as an auteur, her new album presents her not as a solo artist but the frontwoman of a band, who get equal billing in its eponymous title and even have an image: black-clad, heavy on the make-up, shot in monochrome or shadowy muted tones, they look a bit goth.
You could also apply that description to their sound. Van Etten has hardly shied away from using the 80s as a reference point, but while you could imagine, say, 2019’s Seventeen soundtracking the end credits in a John Hughes movie, Live Forever sounds more like something said movie’s surly rebel character might listen to in their bedroom. Electronic rhythms clank around the drums; brooding sequenced pulses and arpeggios are topped off with misty synth tones. The guitar is frequently a spare presence, picking out harmonics and solitary notes while high in the mix, and the bass guitar tends to function more as a lead instrument than a backbone: should anyone wonder where the inspiration for that comes from, Idiot Box opens with a brief, and sweetly obvious homage to New Order. Van Etten frequently points up the breathier, more ethereal aspects of her voice: the flinty, folky tone she used early on in her career is noticeably absent, as is the fingerpicked acoustic guitar that used to accompany it. On Southern Life (What It Must Be Like), her voice takes on an incanting stridency that recalls late 70s Siouxsie.
There are big choruses and lovely melodies that speak to Van Etten’s songwriting craftsmanship, but the overall mood is both hazy and a little tense. That feels fitting. These are songs filled with confusion and foreboding, which leave questions unanswered: “Do you believe in compassion for enemies?” “Who wants to live forever?” “Why can’t you see it from the other side?” Afterlife flips between feeling comforted by the continued presence of someone who’s died and questioning whether the dead even can live on. In I Can’t Imagine (Why You Feel This Way), the sound of a news broadcast is greeted with an equivocal “turn it up / turn it off”, and when parenthood appears as a subject, it’s in terms of fear and apprehension for the future: “My hands are shaking as a mother, trying to raise her son right.” Written and recorded in the UK in 2023, the pervasive tone of insecurity and anxiety about how things might turn out certainly sounds apropos right now.
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Not everything here works. Indio’s brand of motorik Krautrock sounds a little spindly and anaemic; concluding the album with two beatless drifts – lovely though they are – gives the album an odd shape, a sense of the whole business petering out. Then again, given the mood of the songs, perhaps that’s the point: it ends uncertainly and unresolved. What comes before that ending feels bold and fresh, not a complete reinvention so much as an unexpected left turn that takes the artist at its centre somewhere new.
Sharon Van Etten and the Attachment Theory is released 7 February
This week Alexis listened to
Annie-Dog – Please Forgive Me, David Gray
Chaotic but gleaming bedroom pop with melodic interpolations from the titular singer-songwriter’s oeuvre: a charming meditation on how the music you hear as a child never leaves you.