Click Here for Video Sample! Singer/Songwriter's Striking Fifth Album On Limited Edition Clear Blue Vinyl LP!
Sharon Van Etten's Remind Me Tomorrow comes four years after Are We There, and reckons with the life that gets lived when you put off the small and inevitable maintenance in favor of something more present. Throughout Remind Me Tomorrow, Sharon Van Etten veers towards the driving, dark glimmer moods that have illuminated the edges of her music and pursues them full force. With curling low vocals and brave intimacy, Remind Me Tomorrow is an ambitious album that provokes our most sensitive impulses: reckless affections, spirited nurturing, and tender courage.
Remind Me Tomorrow was written in stolen time: in scraps of hours wedged between myriad endeavors - Van Etten guest-starred in The OA, and brought her music onstage in David Lynch's revival of Twin Peaks. Off-screen, she wrote her first score for Katherine Dieckmann's movie Strange Weather and the closing title song for Tig Notaro's show Tig. "The album title makes me giggle," says Van Etten. "It occurred to me one night when I, on auto-pilot, clicked 'remind me tomorrow' on the update window that pops up all the time on my computer. I hadn't updated in months! And it's the simplest of tasks!"
The songs on Remind Me Tomorrow have been transported from Van Etten's original demos through John Congleton's arrangement. Congleton helped flip the signature Sharon Van Etten ratio, making the album more energetic-upbeat than minimal-meditative. "I was feeling overwhelmed. I couldn't let go of my recordings - I needed to step back and work with a producer." She continues, "I tracked two songs as a trial run with John [Jupiter 4 and Memorial Day]. I gave him Suicide, Portishead, and Nick Cave's Skeleton Tree as references and he got excited. I knew we had to work together. It gave me the perspective I needed. It's going to be challenging for people in a good way." The songs are as resonating as ever, the themes are still an honest and subtle approach to love and longing, but Congleton has plucked out new idiosyncrasies from Van Etten's sound.
Alongside working on Remind Me Tomorrow, Van Etten has been exploring her talents (musical, emotional, otherwise) down other paths. She's continuing to act, to write scores and soundtrack contributions, and she's returning to school for psychology. The breadth of these passions, of new careers and projects and lifelong roles, have inflected Remind Me Tomorrow with a wise sense of a warped-time perspective. This is the tension that arches over the album, fusing a pained attentive realism and radiant lightness about new love.
"On her fifth album, Sharon Van Etten conjures tempests and explores their subsequent calms. It is the peak of her songwriting and her most atmospheric, emotionally piercing album to date." - Pitchfork
"'Follow me until you don't know where you are,' she warns near the end of the album on 'You Shadow', and that's honestly the best advice for anyone going into Remind Me Tomorrow. It's also refreshing advice for a time that has never felt more tumultuous, when more and more people are indulging in the comforts of the past rather than finding the will to indulge in the darkness. That's Van Etten. That's this album. And to quote Special Agent Dale Cooper, if we're keeping in theme, 'I have no idea where this will lead us, but I have a definite feeling it will be a place both wonderful and strange.'" - Consequence of Sound, Album of the Week
"Sharon Van Etten was already one of the great lyricists of the '10s, but with this breathtaking new project, she's proved an artistic pliancy her contemporaries may not possess. She hit her stride with Are We There, but here she's not even on the ground." - Paste Magazine
"In October, Sharon Van Etten released her first new song in almost five years. 'Comeback Kid' a thumping slice of electro-pop, coincided with the announcement that she didn't want the single and her fifth album, 'Remind Me Tomorrow', 'to be pretty'. Mission accomplished, then. Because this album, in all its chaotic glory, is raw, heavy and almost certainly the most immediate piece of work she's done thus far... 'Remind Me Tomorrow', then, serves not so much as a nudge, but a forceful and playful shove to remind listeners just how special Van Etten's talent is on both a lyrical and musical level. Don't call it a comeback, but it may well be her most intoxicating and impressive work to date." - NME
"By the time you get to May, it's easy to forget about what music came out in January (especially given the ceaseless onslaught of media these days). Yet, Remind Me Tomorrow has not only remained in the consciousness of music fans but has arguably not been surpassed. Credit that to Van Etten actively avoiding her past compositional habits without abandoning a shred of herself, penning penetrating deconstructions of contentedness from an ultramodern perspective. These tracks take her songwriting down a dark well of synthesizers and atmospherics where rich melodies kick to the surface instead of drowning beneath it. It's the kind of sonic evolution everyone talks about but so few are able to actually pull off. All that makes this her most aggressively fearless effort to date, the arrival of a surprising but stunningly welcome new era for Van Etten." - Consequence of Sound, The Top 25 Albums of 2019 (So Far), June 2019
"Van Etten started out playing hushed, disgruntled folk rock, so she often gets tagged as an 'indie' artist. But she's always had bigger things in mind for her music. Her fantastic new album, Remind Me Tomorrow, ups her ambitions even further, pushing toward a grand, smoldering vision of pop. Van Etten's previous LPs rode a sepulchral slow-burn. This music is just as expansive, but the songs are sharply sculpted. 'No One's Easy to Love' is a hazy intimation of regret with a head-slap groove; on the hot single 'Comeback Kid,' Van Etten sounds like an imperious Eighties MTV avenger, punching her way through gossamer synths and Phil Collins-huge tom-tom rumble. 'Jupiter 4' is like a torch-ballad version of the interplanetary jazz David Bowie explored on Blackstar." - Rolling Stone, The 50 Best Albums of 2019 So Far, June 2019
"In the five years since 2014's Are We There, Sharon Van Etten has scored movies, acted in television, gone back to school, and become a mother. Those things are all a part of her new album Remind Me Tomorrow, but none of them define it. Instead, its biggest change is the presence of indie-world superproducer John Congleton, who bathes Van Etten's songs in a dark electronic menace. Buzzing synths and chilly drum machines underscore the sense that even as you get older and achieve some form of domestic bliss, those old anxieties never quite leave you. 'I don't know how it ends,' she sings on closing track 'Stay,' but it's worth finding out." - Peter Helman, Stereogum, The 50 Best Albums Of 2019 So Far, June 2019
"Sharon Van Etten returns after a five-year break between albums and completely dismantles everything fans have loved about her music: acoustic, singer-songwriter reflections are out; monster beats, jagged synths and dark undercurrents are in, as she sings about the joys and terror of parenthood, growing older and letting go of the past. This record is a triumph." - NPR, Best Albums Of 2019 (So Far)
Features:
• Limited Edition
• Exclusive Clear Blue Vinyl LP
• Gatefold jacket
Selections:
Side A:
1. I Told You Everything
2. No One's Easy To Love
3. Memorial Day
4. Comeback Kid
5. Jupiter 4
Side B:
1. Seventeen
2. Malibu
3. You Shadow
4. Hands
5. Stay
