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”.
