Indie singer-songwriter icon Sharon Van Etten has launched a new band this year, Sharon Van Etten & The Attachment Theory. Their visual aesthetic is brooding, grainy, and monochromatic — truly they look like a lost goth band from 1981 that is being rediscovered anew — but sonically, it’s the pure pulsing emotionalism that Van Etten has perfected time and time again over the past two decades.
Today, the project released “Trouble,” a pensive new song that radiates anxiety as well as love. As Van Etten explains in a press release, “‘Trouble’ is about the idea of having to coexist with people you love who have opposing views, and not being able to share deep parts of yourself and your narrative based on someone else’s beliefs. It’s about when there’s that big part of you that someone who loves you can’t know because it’s not something they want to hear or are willing to learn about or understand, and those painful realizations when you choose to love and respect someone else’s needs over your own to salvage a relationship.”
Along with the song comes a live performance video, taped during the album’s recording sessions at The Church, the London studio and former home base of The Eurythmics. (Very apropos for the look and feel of this project.)