Sharon Van Etten’s self-titled album struggles to attach

The name Sharon Van Etten probably sounds vaguely familiar, but exactly why is unclear. All it takes is to listen to 20 seconds of Van Etten’s song “Seventeen” to know her sound. Since its 2019 release, the song has become one of those unofficial anthems for depressive young women. Van Etten’s new album, Sharon Van Etten & The Attachment Theory, moves away from the pounding radio station indie rock into more of a Kate Bush and Talking Heads-inspired sound.

There is something curious about the record. For one, it is Van Etten’s first collaborative record, co-written with her band The Attachment Theory. It’s exciting to see a musician do something new, especially once their sound is fairly well established. There is a distinct difference between what she’s put out in the past, such as albums like Remind Me Tomorrow and We’ve Been Going About This All Wrong, and what is presented in Sharon Van Etten & The Attachment Theory.

The album, self-titled after Van Etten and her band, can sound too sonically similar to impact a casual listener. On first listen, each song sounds highly repetitive. It is not that each song sounds the same, but rather, that individual songs do not undergo much change. The opening track, “Live Forever,” for example, mostly just repeats the phrases “Who wants to live forever?” and “It doesn’t matter.”

At the same time, sometimes the repetitive nature of the songs works. The third track “Idiot Box” stands out among the rest of the album, a fun indie rock bop about the soul-sucking nature of technology. The song yearns to be played while two down-on-their-luck teens dance around their bedroom, eventually collapsing on the floor in laughter (which is perhaps its own genre of music). As a listener, the urge to spend time laughing with a close friend instead of watching them from afar via social media is strong.

What carries across the album is Van Etten’s reckoning with mortality. “Idiot Box” questions how humans can waste their one precious life glued to screens. In track 2, “Afterlife,” Van Etten repeatedly asks an unknown subject if they will find one another in the afterlife. “Will you feel like coming home?” Van Etten asks the subject over synth and drums. Underneath the uplifting instrumental, “Afterlife” is tender, a new addition to songs questioning what happens when we die. 

The closing track “I Want You Here” sounds like a plea to a lost lover, but it transcends life and death. The ‘you’ Van Etten wants is summoned to the edge of the ocean and the edge of the earth “Even when it hurts.” Even as life pounds on, Van Etten wants them there. There is no explicit language referencing death, but something about the language and the crescendo the group builds to feel like it extends beyond this plane of existence.