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Hear Sharon Van Etten Break Down Every Track On Her Stunning New Album

The singer reflects on how her life has changed in the five years since her previous album, shares stories about her new songs, and explains why she decided to demolish her beloved sound.

A lot has changed in Sharon Van Etten's life since she put out her last album, Are We There, in 2014. In the past five years, she's gotten into acting, gone back to school to get a degree in mental-health counseling, worked on film scores and become a mom.

But through it all, she eventually found herself coming back to her first love: music. Van Etten has a new, and it's unlike anything she's done before. Though she was largely seen as an acoustic singer-songwriter early in her career, her new album is full of pulsing synths, big beats and lots of strange, dark textures made with the help of producer John Congleton. The result is a stunning achievement for Van Etten. is her most ambitious, adventurous and, I think, best album to date.

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