Sharon Van Etten is concerned that people will make fun of her next career move: fronting a goth rock band. “Maybe it’s my insecurity that people will see, ‘Oh, someone in their forties decided to have a band – whatever, who cares,’” she says, looking to the floor and imagining the sarcastic jab to follow: “No one’s ever heard of that.” I’m not sure how she turned up to interviews before, but today every indie rock musician’s favourite musician looks the part in a black hoodie, surrounded by instruments, sitting in her home studio in Los Angeles.
Most fortysomethings suspected of having a midlife crisis, though, are not Grammy-nominated artists who made a male newscaster cry with a simple on-air live performance. Nor do they have their own heroes, Nick Cave and The National, offering up praise. This is a woman who has managed to bottle her very own bittersweet flavour of nostalgia; just thinking about her duet with Angel Olsen “Like I Used To” reminds me of a summer I spent feeling yearningly, tragically hopeful. I’m not the first critic to suggest that the current generation of women in indie rock – boygenius, Snail Mail and Soccer Mommy included – wouldn’t have created work as textured and well-received without the influence of Van Etten’s emotional complexity on albums such as Are We There and Remind Me Tomorrow. At first glance, her gothic turn feels like a rogue decision, yet her music can often linger hauntingly in gloom. Just listen to her voice descend in Siouxsie Sioux swoops on the chorus of the single “Southern Life (What It Must Be Like)”. It’s a match made in some dark heaven.
