Landmark venue provides showcase for indie rock songwriter’s new band and career-high album
Sharon Van Etten brings her London-inspired new album to brilliant life as she takes over the Royal Albert Hall with new band The Attachment Theory. Pulsating rhythms, vibrant synths and waves of chorused guitar locate a hypnotic set of songs very much in the city they were written.
Van Etten arrives for the first time as the member of a band rather than a songwriter. This comes after a breakthrough period, beginning with the release 2014’s Are We There, taking in appearances in Netflix’s The OA and the rebooted Twin Peaks, escalating with 2019’s Remind Me Tomorrow and its hit single Seventeen. Most recent album We’ve Been Going About This All Wrong was well received, but marked the natural end point of the stylistic journey van Etten had been on, from sparser, more confessional early records to widescreen anthems with a strutting momentum.
After that tour, she tired of her own voice leading the conversation, and in an impromptu jam session ended up writing two songs in two hours. Feeling fresh impetus from external input, she put together an actual band, came to London where so many of her influences have called home, and quickly wrote and recorded a self-titled album In Church Studios. The Attachment Theory, comprised of Devra Hoff on bass, Teeny Lieberson on keys and guitar and Jorge Balbi on percussion, have allowed van Etten to write in partnership and renew her perspective after six effectively solo records.
Tonight’s show is causing palpable excitement for all involved. Homegrown opener Nabihah Iqbal has brought pretty much everyone she knows to witness her 80s revivalist backing tracks and vocals that are sometimes spoken word mantras and sometimes airy coos. They make a lovely enveloping sound, though the marked switch up in quality when they launch into an excellent cover of The Cure’s A Forest suggests the songwriting has a little room to sharpen yet.
The band take the stage and launch into Live Forever, synth bass rumbling as van Etten repeats the opening line – ‘who wants to live forever?’ in deftly increasing intensity until the drums kick in and the groove begins. Lead single Afterlife follows, inspired by a friendship developed with a terminally ill fan. As a mission statement for the album it hits every mark, with vocals alternately hauntingly angelic and anthemically powerful. Van Etten has always enjoyed a British crowd and this is no exception: a blokey shout out of ‘we love you Shazza’ inspires her to explain how all her friends back home have adopted the name.
Idiot Box is an uptempo critique of smartphone addiction handled more subtly than the title suggests, with crystalline synth melodies in support. Next up Headspace, the first airing of older material, before a run of four more from the new record including second and third singles Southern Life (What Must It Be Like?) and Trouble, respectively an attempt to understand differing worldviews rather than simply dismiss them, and the contortionist and ultimately futile challenge of trying to work around and accommodate those views when they take root in loved ones.
A string of older crowdpleasers are enthusiastically welcomed, including the slightly menacing, fuzzy lurch of No One Is Easy to Love, fitting the new sound here, and a sped up version of Every Time The Sun Comes Up, which retains the balance of sultry edge, emotional weight and goofy humour that makes van Etten’s work so singular. Having played the song in Twin Peaks: The Return, she dedicates Tarifa to David Lynch, with the arrangement tweaked to dial up the latent Lynchian 1950s ballad elements – it could easily sub in for the song being recorded in Mulholland Drive’s audition scenes.
Seventeen gets a rousing reception, and London has always been fertile ground for a song as much about gentrification as it is about ageing. Its soaring bridge and singalong chorus land perfectly, and yet in a show of confidence in the new material she chooses the last two songs from the latest record as main set closer and encore, albeit in reverse order. I Want You Here’s slow build and repeating lyrical motifs are recurring touches from the new material as the band grapple with tension and release.
Fading Beauty is spectral and meditative and sends us into the night blanketed in synths. Van Etten is hitting new heights despite an already garlanded catalogue, and she enjoys herself thoroughly at possibly the most consequential show of her career to date. She says she feels lucky to been here: so are a great many of us..
Further Reading
Sharon van Etten and the Attachment Theory – Idiot Box
Sharon van Etten and the Attachment Theory – Afterlive (live)