A couple of months in the past, André 3000 succinctly defined the inventive philosophy that has animated his unlikely pivot to ambient-jazz flautist. “Generally, mastering shit can get boring,” the previous OutKast member instructed Rolling Stone. “I’d somewhat go novice attention-grabbing than grasp boring.”
I saved considering of André’s eccentric credo whereas listening to this exhilarating debut (properly… kind of) from Sharon Van Etten & The Attachment Principle. Whereas Van Etten hasn’t reworked right into a flute-toting vagabond (but), she has spent the latter half of her profession shifting away from something resembling a consolation zone. After taking her smoke-damaged indie-folk sound so far as it might go on her fourth album, 2014’s Are We There, the singer took a break from music and embraced being a novice once more, making her appearing debut on Netflix’s short-lived The OA and going again to highschool to review psychology. Finally, she reemerged with 2019’s Remind Me Tomorrow, a rare album wrought from atmospheric synths and curdled dread.
If 2022’s We’ve Been Going About This All Flawed felt like a slight retreat—a craving for home consolation amid disasters each international (pandemic) and native (the wildfires depicted on the album cowl)—its follow-up indicators one other new starting. Or new band, somewhat, as this one’s billed not as a solo album however a report written in full collaboration with Van Etten’s bandmates, newly dubbed the Attachment Principle. Why type a band sixteen years right into a celebrated solo profession? Why not? Throughout rehearsals for her 2022 tour, Van Etten grew uninterested in her personal voice and impulsively requested her band to “simply jam.” The experiment yielded two songs—the spiky post-punk exercise “I Can’t Think about (Why You Really feel This Method)” and sludgy, disquieted “Southern Life (What It Should Be Like)”—and left the singer “feeling very impressed.”
It wasn’t a fluke. On Sharon Van Etten & The Attachment Principle, the frontwoman surrenders to the rhythm on a stormy, unsettled album centered on groove and temper. In lieu of verse-chorus buildings, songs circle round mantra-like motifs, swirling and intensifying like twister winds. “Who desires to reside endlessly?” she wonders again and again on the gorgeous opener, flipping the aspirational immortality of Oasis’s same-named hit on its head as spectral synths from keyboardist Teeny Lieberson cleared the path. Impressed by Van Etten’s friendship with a fan who died younger from a persistent sickness, “Afterlife” goes even larger, reflecting the widescreen grandeur of Remind Me Tomorrow standout “Seventeen.” Greedy in any respect the massive stuff—life, love, mortality—the track evokes the specter of a connection so sturdy it makes you wish to imagine within the fantasy of reunion after loss of life: “Turned me inside out and now I discover/I wish to see you within the afterlife,” Van Etten croons.