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.

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.

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.

For Remind Me Tomorrow, Van Etten put down the guitar. The album shows a magnetism towards new instruments: piano keys that churn, deep drones, distinctive sharp drums.

It was "reverb universe" she says of the writing. There are intense synths, a propulsive organ, a distorted harmonium.

The breadth of Van Etten's passions (musical, emotional, otherwise), 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.