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Boston Globe
25-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
Sharon Van Etten on adding the band name to the marquee
It wasn't just about reconnection after an extended period of uncertain isolation, either. The singer viewed that degree of closeness and engagement with the process as a way of offering her musicians ownership over the material: 'As a band, they give up so much to leave their friends and family behind to support your ideas. This is another extension of me wanting to write songs from the ground up and share in that creative process and show the love and hopefully help everybody feel that much more invested and cared for and looked after.' Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up That sense of communal togetherness was key to 'Sharon Van Etten & The Attachment Theory,' a seventh album and a debut all at the same time. The band (which plays Advertisement 'I think the most surprising thing to me was that it was really natural,' Van Etten says. 'On my previous records, I've written by myself. I've built it up by myself. There was nobody telling me when I had to finish writing songs, because I would have a collection of songs. At band camp, however, Van Etten was less precious about having to know what she wanted before the band entered the equation. With the musicians using their chosen instruments to explore rather than fill in an existing framework, they came up with chord progressions that the singer would find melodies for and develop. 'There were moments where I helped define what was happening next, but they were naturally playing things that I was very inspired by,' says Van Etten. 'It felt very intuitive.' Advertisement Intuitive though it may have been, the new songs mark a substantial break from Van Etten's previous work. If the sharp and propulsive 'Mistakes' felt like an oasis of danceability on the otherwise expansive and atmospheric 'We've Been Going About This All Wrong,' then 'Sharon Van Etten & The Attachment Theory' is all oasis, sort of. Krautrock and post-punk influences abound, from Neu! and Can to the Cure and Joy Division, and Van Etten likens 'Live Forever' to Even nominally familiar ground comes with new elements. 'Fading Beauty' has some of the same slow momentum and spacious build as Van Etten's earlier work, but it's filled with textures that are new to her, and 'Southern Life (What It Must Be Like)' finds her using her voice in ways that she hasn't tried before. She credits the spontaneity of the band process for the latter. 'It was more rhythmic [ideas] that I was trying to mess around with, and they had this kind of proggy jam happening,' Van Etten says. 'I was just trying to play around with patterns and syncopations, and I felt like it was getting repetitive for me, melodically, so I was like, Where can I go from here, where it kind of sounds like a different instrument? And that's when I go high. And I think also I don't normally do a lot of talking-style singing, so I was just trying to experiment with that. Again, not knowing it was for anything. Advertisement 'When you have that freedom, or that sense [that] it's not being recorded for a record and no one has to hear this beyond this circle of trust here, I think you just throw as much paint as you can. I didn't know what would stick.' Perhaps it's that level of trust that leads Van Etten to refer to the Attachment Theory not just in terms of camp but in terms of family, referencing their 'sibling dynamics' and seeing each other as a traveling support system. But if that's not enough, there's plenty to be found on the road regardless. 'You'll probably see my sister at the [Roadrunner] show. If I'm [on the] East Coast, some Van Etten will be there. I think my dad's bringing, like, ten people to Philly,' says the New Jersey native with a chuckle. 'So I'm always prepared to have a relative at a show. And I feel so fortunate to have such a supportive family, even when it gets hard to see them all. 'I did have a cousin at a Bowery Ballroom show [in New York] get a little drunk and yell 'You [expletive] slut!' at the front row, and I had to explain to everyone around her that it was my cousin just messing with me. But it was very funny, and she hasn't lived that down yet, my cousin Jackie.' SHARON VAN ETTEN & THE ATTACHMENT THEORY At Roadrunner on Thursday, May 1. 8 p.m. Marc Hirsh can be reached at officialmarc@ or on Bluesky @ Advertisement
The Independent
07-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
Sharon Van Etten and The Attachment Theory's self-titled record is an early Album of the Year contender
Imagine a Rubik's Cube made of undiluted jelly. If you can go a step further and picture someone repeatedly manipulating those rubbery cubes through a complex series of puzzled sequences, then you'll have a good sense of how ingeniously gelatinous the bass lines of Sharon Van Etten' s seventh album sound. Slip-squelching out from beneath the intuitive fingertips of Devra Hoff, they form a terrific backdrop for the way Van Etten twist-turns her way through the emotional problems addressed on the self-titled Sharon Van Etten & The Attachment Theory. This is the first time the New Jersey-born Van Etten has shared the credit with her band – making that choice with double emphasis in both the title and artists' names. Long-term fans of her frequently introspective songwriting won't be surprised to learn that she has always written alone… until now. She began her career after recovering from a long-term abusive relationship with a fellow musician, who she claims would mock and belittle her musical ideas and aspirations. No wonder she felt safer unpicking and unpacking her thoughts in private. But now she's happily resettled in LA with a partner and eight-year-old son, seemingly loosened up enough to try writing songs during jam sessions. Sensitively produced by Marta Salogni, the result is both seductive and hypnotic – it's as though Van Etten has taken a creative stage dive and found herself held aloft by supportive bandmates, who prove more than capable of taking the weight of her ideas while offering lovely, post-punk inflected directional drifts of their own. Hoff's bass often provides the muscle that lifts Van Etten's breathy voice and abstract lyrics. Teeny Lieberson and Charley Damsky's synths charge the whole record with electric dream melodies that wouldn't sound out of place on a David Lynch soundtrack. They oscillate beneath the many questions posed by the opener, 'Live Forever'...'What keeps you up at night?/ What don't you understand?' And the question marks keep coming. 'Do you feel me coming home? Do you want to be at home?' Van Etten wonders on 'Afterlife'. Jorge Balbi's propulsive drum-rattle gives her a little shimmy-shake on 'Idiot Box', while Alex Reeve's guitars score their way into the insecurities expressed on 'Indio'. 'I Can't Imagine (Why You Feel This Way)' rides on the monster-truck tyres of a mighty bass groove that's going to rip it when performed live. It's great fun to hear Van Etten sneer out a little disdainful disconnect after all the empathic philosophy. 'I know that someone had a real nice day,' she eye-rolls.'Don't want to hear about it anyway… Oh my head!' The change of mood is explained when she follows that with, 'took the medicine, now feeling strange'. But she's back with the queries – crowd-surfing over shimmering synths, pounding drums and raw guitar – on 'Somethin' Aint Right' – as she asks her audience what they want for their friends and families. The repeated, 'Do you believe in compassion for enemies?' is a good question for the 2020s, although Van Etten makes it timeless by nodding back to the (equally philosophical) Talking Heads, quoting the lyric 'same as it ever was' from their 1980 hit, 'Once in a Lifetime'. The album settles into soothing acceptance with its closing two tracks. 'Fading Beauty' floats on ripples of echoey piano and brush-tapped cymbals as Van Etten conjures zen images of 'radiant silver… hanging on branches'. 'I Want You' is driven by a muffled, heartbeat-thud of solidarity on the drums as Van Etten assures us: 'I want you here/ Even when it hurts.' This isn't an album that sets out to solve any of life's puzzles. But it shares them with such nuanced, tactile empathy that I may already have found my album of the year.
