Sharon Van Etten, Remind Me Tomorrow, album review: Torchbearer of American folk casts a warm glow behind the record’s psychic overview

Alongside Angel Olsen, she’s reimagined the form with ballads that are introspective yet assertive, unafraid to plunge into personal quandaries without providing songwriterly reassurance

(Ryan Pfluger)

After a period of tumult, Sharon Van Etten’s fifth album is a reinvention. But beneath its hazy synths and electronics are songs of endurance and inner peace, of settling after a flurry of activity.

Since breaking out with her 2012 album, Tramp, the New Jersey songwriter has composed a film score, studied to become a counsellor and, without an acting background, starred in Netflix series The OA.

At the same time, she’s emerged as a torchbearer of American folk. Alongside Angel Olsen, she’s reimagined the form with ballads that are introspective yet assertive, unafraid to plunge into personal quandaries without providing songwriterly reassurance.

On Remind Me Tomorrow, written during her recent pregnancy and the birth of her first child, Van Etten dims her spotlight on toxicity and instead casts a warm glow behind the record’s psychic overview.

The anxiety and pride of impending parenthood converge on “Seventeen”, a paean to the invincibility and melancholy of adolescence. Addressing a younger version of herself, the 37-year-old sings of the carefree young and their mistrust of those defeated by time.

It is heartland synthpop relaying a dream of hopeful parents, that the next generation will relive our best lives while avoiding our worst mistakes. In its narrative shifts is a more sobering implication: that both well-wishing elders and the teens sure they’ll never be like them will each see their worst fears come true.

“Seventeen” winks at the inevitable, then celebrates it. Remind Me Tomorrow is best in thrall to this untouchable energy, when Van Etten and her band sound ecstatic despite their worldly wisdom.

“I Told You Everything”, the album opener, playfully misdirects listeners anticipating grandiose misery. The song alludes to a bare-all conversation (“Sitting in the bar I told you everything/ You said, ‘Holy s*** / You almost died’”) without divulging much beyond the thrill of romantic intimacy.

As well as expectations of confessional singers, Van Etten subverts folk music’s focus on bare-bones songwriting. Not only does studio wizardry enhance “Memorial Day” and “Hands” but it meddles with them, using fragments of discord and eerie effects: astral echoes, ghostly screeches and scraping mechanics. Sometimes they obscure the foundations like asteroids dislodging spaceship parts.

Van Etten was inspired here by Skeleton Tree, the album of stark drone-scapes that her former tourmate Nick Cave wrote after his teenage son’s death. Compared with that record, so vast that its ghosts had nowhere to hide, the handiwork of Van Etten and producer John Congleton is both fussier and murkier, leaving little space in the recording.

While a song like “No One’s Easy to Love” benefits from its scale, the swampy five-minute dirge “Jupiter 4” gets bogged down when something airier, or just shorter, might have done.

But the daintiest composition, “Stay”, is her most perfectly realised yet, reminiscent of Blonde Redhead’s epic confections. Over music box chimes and heel-clicking percussion, she coos: “You won’t let me go astray/You will let me find my way.”

After years making peace with drift and uncertainty, she’s never sounded more sure of anything.