To my ears, Sharon Van Etten hit a creative peak when she expanded her sound on the 2019 album Remind Me Tomorrow, which I liked a whole lot. On the evidence of her new track, “Afterlife,” maybe she felt the same way. That album’s fine follow-up, We’ve Been Going About This All Wrong, was a partial return to the more spare, more insular tones of her earlier work. She’s swinging back to bigger, more layered music.

To accomplish this circling back to Remind Me Tomorrow fullness, Van Etten assembled a new backing band dubbed the Attachment Theory. Their first offering is a vibrant, enticing single of smart pop with clean, clear, evocative lyrics: “Someone inside me saved me/ Made me see the light/ Someone had to make it feel alright.”

The self-titled release from Sharon Van Etten & the Attachment Theory is scheduled for release in February.