Sharon Van Etten
Collins Barracks, Dublin
★★★★☆
If Oasis had not already made the year their own, there would surely be a case for celebrating 2025 as the summer of goth.
The second season of Wednesday, on Netflix, is introducing Gen Z to the joys of shaded eyeliner and blood-freezing pouts. Robert Smith of The Cure was a surprise guest at Olivia Rodrigo’s Glastonbury set (a surprise to the seemingly gobsmacked Smith, at least). A remake of Wuthering Heights – goth in petticoats – looms on the horizon. Grim is in.
It’s the ideal moment, then, for the cult songwriter Sharon Van Etten to put a goth twist on her deep and heavy confessional pop. The irony is that her move towards all things cold of heart and black of lipstick came out of a new creative partnership with her live band. Goth is about being alone. For Van Etten it has fostered a sense of community.
Although she has been touring as Sharon Van Etten & the Attachment Theory since the start of the year, this winningly melodramatic show at Collins Barracks on Thursday feels like the ideal dark baptism for the project. Under the fading sunlight, the severe 18th-century building – a stonework frown if ever there was one – is the perfect framing device for a performance wreathed in dry ice and nicely chilled angst.
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Van Etten has established herself as one of the great troubadours of her generation since her debut album, in 2009. Her devotees include fellow alternative royalty such as The National and Fiona Apple, as well as the experimental film-maker Brit Marling, who cast her in her bonkers TV series The OA (which could as easily have been titled WTF?).
The late David Lynch was a fan, too. He even arranged for Van Etten to perform on his series Twin Peaks: The Return. (Tonight she returns the compliment, dedicating the ballad Tarifa to his memory.)
You can see why Van Etten would appeal to pop culture’s ultimate weirdness whisperer: he’d have loved The Attachment Theory and its obsession with the meaning of life and what comes after. Those are the subjects Van Etten and her bandmates, dressed head to toe in black, wrestle with as they open with the forlorn synth wail of Live Forever and the Nine Inch Nails-go-shoegaze throb of Afterlife.
Rifling her favourite 1980s influences like a kid who has found the key to a secret room in the basement, Van Etten proceeds to conjure the Gary Numan within via the dystopian electronica of Idiot Box.
Having revealed that her Irish-American parents flew in from New Jersey to surprise her before the show, she then puts a new-wave spin on Every Time the Sun Comes Up. She turns the jangling, fraught fan favourite into one of those New Order dirges where it’s all about the guitars rather than the drum machines.
Night has well and truly got its grip on Collins Barrack as she encores with Give Out, from her breakthrough album, Tramp (produced by Aaron Dessner of The National, who was later to work with Taylor Swift).
The stark tune is from early in her career, but it’s easy to draw a connection between it and her grimdark output with The Attachment Theory. Maybe she has been a goth all along, and it has taken until now for her to embrace that truth. If so, the cheers that ripple around the venue confirm she is not alone.
