On the face of it, the centrepiece of Sharon Van Etten’s fifth album is straightforward. Seventeen is magnificent, yes, in its evocation and evolution of that windswept strain of 80s rock that emerged when musicians who predated punk turned their ears to the new wave. But isn’t nostalgia for being a teenager one of the oldest entries in rock’s lexicon? “I used to be free,” she sings, “I used to be 17.” It is on finding out more about Van Etten’s life that one realises she might have more desire than most to retrace her teenage steps and wonder where else they might have led.
She was 17 when she entered a relationship that was to dominate the succeeding years. “He was an addict and abusive and so I just never knew who I would be coming home to,” she told the Observer earlier this year. It wasn’t that Remind Me Tomorrow keeps returning to that part of her past; but it seems as though becoming a parent led Van Etten – already a devastatingly intimate songwriter – to look at life in a way that calibrates the joys against the sorrows, to see the darkness but be willing to banish it.
The mood is set from the opening seconds of the album. “Sitting at the bar, I told you everything / You said, ‘Holy shit, you almost died,” she sings, beginning I Told You Everything. That song is about recounting something from her past to her partner, about taking the jump from the easy intimacy of friendship to the point where one has to at least partially dismantle the facade and reveal something of what lies behind. It is also a potent symbol of hope: that from the sharing of a devastating confidence can come love.
At times, Remind Me Tomorrow is uncomplicatedly joyous. Jupiter 4 is as plainly spoken as a supermarket Valentine’s Day card: “Our love’s for real / How’d it take a long, long time / To let us feel?” In Malibu, Van Etten and her companion are “just a couple of dudes who don’t give a fuck”, cruising around in a little red car. Yet it is also an album that is unsettling, even at its most reassuring.
The choice of US indie’s buzziest producer, John Congleton (Angel Olsen, St Vincent, Future Islands), was a statement that this would not sound like her previous albums – and it doesn’t. Van Etten had tired of the guitar before making Remind Me Tomorrow, and synths and keyboards are the dominant instruments. When guitar appears, it can be a disruptor – as with the massively fuzzed and overdriven line that breaks into the verses of You Shadow. Even on a song as platitudinous as Hands – written, she said, after arguing with her partner and about forgiving the frivolous offences of everyday life – the music has a gothic intensity that doesn’t allow the sentiments to sit quietly. (At times, oddly, it sounds like the older sibling to Billie Eilish’s 2019 debut.)
Although it uses sounds and textures familiar from the 80s, Remind Me Tomorrow doesn’t sound like an 80s record. But it recalls the kind of 80s pop when older musicians would reach the top end of the charts with sophisticated, modern records that used production techniques from records for teenagers and applied them to songs about adult life. Remind Me Tomorrow is a grownup record that doesn’t sound jaded. It is alive with possibility.
