Sharon Van Etten’s doing things a little differently at the moment.
Her latest album is a group effort with her longtime band, but even still, the self-titled release — dropped on Feb. 7 — serves as something of a formal introduction to Van Etten and the Attachment Theory.
The night of April 28 in the nation’s capital, Van Etten and her mates dazzled a capacity crowd at 9:30 Club, clearly invigorated and unified by the fresh batch of songs they’ve created. And the band leader herself was proud to tell the room how the music came to be.
From dreamy rock escapades to shamelessly funky electro-struts, the new tunes have quickly caught on, and those on hand at the sold-out club last week were transfixed by Van Etten and the band and exhilarated by their sound, too.
Listen to Sharon Van Etten and the Attachment Theory’s self-titled album, released to Jagjaguwar, via Spotify:
She was backed by the trio comprising the Attachment Theory — Jorge Balbi on drums, Devra Hoff on bass, and Teeny Lieberson on keys — as well as Shanna Polley on guitar.
“This is kind of a new thing,” Van Etten said in DC. “This is the first time I’ve written songs from the ground up with a band before.”
She drew big applause before explaining how she’d assembled the group in preparation to tour her previous album, 2022’s We’ve Been Going About This All Wrong. They gathered — for the first time since the pandemic — at a house in the desert, eating breakfast, lunch, and dinner together and making use of an attached studio.
At the end of the week, they had room in the schedule.
“So, for the first time ever, I asked everyone if they wanted to jam. For those who know me, you know I don’t even like saying that word,” Van Etten said.
“But it actually was the most healing and beautiful moment of connection that I ever had with a group of people musically. In about an hour, we wrote like two songs, and that was the impetus for me to start — after we did that tour, I quickly booked another week session specifically to write and we ended up writing 14 songs in a week in the same place.”
Fans in the nation’s capital heard not only freshly released tracks like “Southern Life (What It Must Be Like),” but supercharged takes on Van Etten staples like “Every Time the Sun Comes Up” and “Seventeen.” Meanwhile, a grateful Van Etten was as alluring as ever while sharing insight into her — and her band’s — songwriting.
Setlist
Live Forever
Afterlife
Idiot Box
Comeback Kid
I Can’t Imagine (Why You Feel This Way)
Somethin’ Ain’t Right
Southern Life (What It Must Be Like)
Trouble
No One’s Easy to Love
Anything
Every Time the Sun Comes Up
Hands
Tarifa
Seventeen
I Want You Here
Encore
I Wish I Knew
Fading Beauty
Below are color digital photos along with some home-rolled/developed/scanned black-and-white 35mm film shots of Sharon Van Etten and the Attachment Theory performing at 9:30 Club on April 28, 2025. All images copyright and courtesy of Casey Ryan Vock.
