Sharon Van Etten and The Attachment Theory’s self-titled record is an early Album of the Year contender

Imagine a Rubik's Cube made of undiluted jelly. If you can go a step further and picture someone repeatedly manipulating those rubbery cubes through a complex series of puzzled sequences, then you’ll have a good sense of how ingeniously gelatinous the bass lines of Sharon Van Etten’s seventh album sound. Slip-squelching out from beneath the intuitive fingertips of Devra Hoff, they form a terrific backdrop for the way Van Etten twist-turns her way through the emotional problems addressed on the self-titled Sharon Van Etten & The Attachment Theory.

This is the first time the New Jersey-born Van Etten has shared the credit with her band – making that choice with double emphasis in both the title and artists’ names. Long-term fans of her frequently introspective songwriting won’t be surprised to learn that she has always written alone… until now. She began her career after recovering from a long-term abusive relationship with a fellow musician, who she claims would mock and belittle her musical ideas and aspirations. No wonder she felt safer unpicking and unpacking her thoughts in private. But now she’s happily resettled in LA with a partner and eight-year-old son, seemingly loosened up enough to try writing songs during jam sessions.

Sensitively produced by Marta Salogni, the result is both seductive and hypnotic – it’s as though Van Etten has taken a creative stage dive and found herself held aloft by supportive bandmates, who prove more than capable of taking the weight of her ideas while offering lovely, post-punk inflected directional drifts of their own.

Hoff’s bass often provides the muscle that lifts Van Etten’s breathy voice and abstract lyrics. Teeny Lieberson and Charley Damsky’s synths charge the whole record with electric dream melodies that wouldn’t sound out of place on a David Lynch soundtrack. They oscillate beneath the many questions posed by the opener, “Live Forever”...“What keeps you up at night?/ What don’t you understand?”

And the question marks keep coming. “Do you feel me coming home? Do you want to be at home?” Van Etten wonders on “Afterlife”. Jorge Balbi’s propulsive drum-rattle gives her a little shimmy-shake on “Idiot Box”, while Alex Reeve’s guitars score their way into the insecurities expressed on “Indio”.

“I Can’t Imagine (Why You Feel This Way)” rides on the monster-truck tyres of a mighty bass groove that’s going to rip it when performed live. It’s great fun to hear Van Etten sneer out a little disdainful disconnect after all the empathic philosophy. “I know that someone had a real nice day,” she eye-rolls.“Don’t want to hear about it anyway… Oh my head!” The change of mood is explained when she follows that with, “took the medicine, now feeling strange”.

But she’s back with the queries – crowd-surfing over shimmering synths, pounding drums and raw guitar – on “Somethin’ Aint Right” – as she asks her audience what they want for their friends and families. The repeated, “Do you believe in compassion for enemies?” is a good question for the 2020s, although Van Etten makes it timeless by nodding back to the (equally philosophical) Talking Heads, quoting the lyric “same as it ever was” from their 1980 hit, “Once in a Lifetime”.

The album settles into soothing acceptance with its closing two tracks. “Fading Beauty” floats on ripples of echoey piano and brush-tapped cymbals as Van Etten conjures zen images of “radiant silver… hanging on branches”. “I Want You” is driven by a muffled, heartbeat-thud of solidarity on the drums as Van Etten assures us: “I want you here/ Even when it hurts.”

This isn’t an album that sets out to solve any of life’s puzzles. But it shares them with such nuanced, tactile empathy that I may already have found my album of the year.