The first song from Sharon Van Etten’s forthcoming album Remind Me Tomorrow, her first since 2014’s Are We There, marks a major change in the singer-songwriter’s sound. Her early work was earthy, folky—the stuff of steel strings, natural room tone, and few bells or whistles. Even when she went fully electric and fantastically multi-tracked, with 2012’s Tramp, her music retained its rock’n’roll rootedness. So it might be surprising to now find someone credited on “tape loops,” and producer John Congleton on the Roland TR-808, the drum machine that’s given everyone from Afrika Bambaataa to Kanye their subwoofer-busting oomph.
Change goes to the heart of the record. Writing while pregnant and studying psychology, Van Etten shelved the guitar and mapped out her demos on piano, organ, and synthesizer; Congleton encouraged her to stick with the shift. On “Comeback Kid,” that decision leaps from the speakers in rainy streaks of synth and thunderous snares, dramatic as 1980s new wave at its most stadium-sized. Her voice sounds almost like Siouxsie Sioux here—deep, bellowing, and fuzzed out at the edge of the distorted signal—and her tone is muscular and triumphant, with a controlled vibrato that suggests someone shouldering into a brisk wind.
Van Etten has often been pegged as a “confessional” writer, but her narrative sensibility is more complex than that. There are multiple speakers in “Comeback Kid”; on the page, set off by italics and quotation marks, the printed lyrics slip between different characters, even though the story she tells boils down to a single choice: Do I stay or do I go? “I’m the runaway,” she admits early on, which she frames in an iconography suggestive of old movies, the language of champions and has-beens and second chances. “‘Hey, you’re the comeback kid’”—it could be a line from a film about a boxer. Toward the end, when she moves sneakily from the general to the specific—“Got a job now that my brother found, working nights just a mile away”—it sounds not unlike something the late novelist Denis Johnson might have slipped into his stark, unforgiving stories about down-and-out characters.
Everything feels compressed here, from the bold-strokes images to the song’s three-minute runtime, and it’s over before you know it. The chorus derives much of its power from dropping beats, fitting the hook into a shorter phrase than the ear expects. That final, cymbal-battered refrain—“Comeback kid! Comeback kid! Comeback kid! Let me look at you!”—hits like a succession of one-two punches, leaving you dazed and reeling before the whole thing fades suddenly to black.
