Sharon Van Etten Tries a New Role: Team Player

Sharon Van Etten isn’t the kind of songwriter who blends into a group. She’s always had an uncanny knack for making you feel utterly alone in the dark with her songs, even when you’re hearing them in broad daylight or singing them with a crowd. Who else would begin an album with the line “Sitting at the bar, I told you everything,” then follow it with “You said, ‘Holy shit’”? Ever since her earliest indie-folk days, she’s known how to turn any room into the loneliest place on earth. 

So it’s a bold move for her to try a different musical role: one of the band. She even names the album after her new quartet, Sharon Van Etten and the Attachment Theory. It’s her most groove-oriented music, the first time she’s composed by jamming with other musicians. It hits hard from the opening “Live Forever,” with a pounding synth-pop pulse as she pleads, over and over, “Who wants to live forever?” Yet it’s got the emotionally ferocious power that Van Etten has always delivered, even when it was just her and an acoustic guitar. 

Collaboration like this doesn’t come easy to a confessional artist so at home in solitude. “I tend to write from a therapeutic place,” Van Etten told Rolling Stone in 2022. “Sometimes the only way I can really get through a moment is, I’ll go into a room, I’ll hit ‘record,’ and I’ll get it out.”

Attachment Theory goes deeper into the synth-heavy sound she dove into with 2019’s Remind Me Tomorrow, the album where she translated her cathartic storytelling into giant rock bombast, without losing the intimate force of her voice. It’s propulsive, with extremely Vince Clarke electro-burbles driving the beat. Yet it has the indie torch-ballad candor of early gems like Tramp and Epic, the style she perfected a decade ago with her masterwork Are We There. The songs sound deeper and darker the more you listen.

“Idiot Box” is the clincher, an irresistibly anthemic synth rush where she watches phone junkies trade their flesh-and-blood lives for a zombie existence of staring at screens. “All that skin against the glass,” she sings. “All these things we think we lack / All this time we won’t get back.” There’s so much urgency in her voice (with a clever Arcade Fire-style “let’s go!”) beefed up by the frenetic beat.

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Van Etten’s always had a fetish for Eighties electro-goth kicks, but she really goes wild here — The Cure, Siouxsie, Kate Bush, Bowie and Eno are all over the grooves. Sonically, it’s dominated by new keyboardist Teeny Lieberson, who’s obviously a huge Depeche Mode fan. That’s the biggest music influence here, especially the mid-Eighties sheen of Black Celebration. The connection runs deep — producer Marta Solangi engineered Depeche Mode’s latest album, Memento Mori.

You can hear that Van Etten is someone who’s excited about playing with a democratic combo, and also pretty new at it. (Calling your group “The Attachment Theory” just screams First Band Name.) She’s always had impeccable players, going back to the National on Tramp, but she’s a team player now. The rhythm section came together for her last album, the surprisingly overlooked but excellent 2022 We’ve Been Going About This All Wrong, with peaks like “Darkish,” “Born,” and “Far Away.” Defra Hoff adds her fluid bass commentary, giving the whole album the Hejira-style flow of a singer and musicians thinking out loud together as the songs spill out. 

The chemistry works wonders in “I Can’t Imagine (Why You Feel This Way,” postpunk disco with a touch of Blondie and Delta 5, or “Something Ain’t Right,” with its New Order dance-floor guitar flourishes and the hook “Same as it ever was.” (Non-band member Alex Reeve plays guitar across the album.) “Indio” is a high-pressure Krautrock-via-Stereolab groove, while the stark “I Want You Here” closes the album with a powerhouse vocal and Jorge Balbi’s head-bang drums. “Southern Living” is a slow-motion tale of parenting in a broken world, as she mourns, “My hands are shaking as a mother/Trying to raise her son right.”

All over the album, Van Etten sounds rejuvenated by the sense of taking new risks and chasing new sonic adventures, which comes through in the tunes. “Trouble” sums it up in a languid groove somewhere between Fleetwood Mac and Talk Talk. She contemplates the danger of taking a romantic plunge, savoring “all the trouble I got you in.”  As she sings, “All these stories that I can’t tell/ Watered-down versions of my own hell.” But there’s nothing watered-down about Attachment Theory — even with the all-hands-on-deck spirit, Sharon Van Etten’s voice comes through loud and clear.