The sixth album from Sharon Van Etten, We’ve Been Going About This All Wrong, was produced in her home studio in Los Angeles and as she recently told NME, it’s a pandemic album about the “collective trauma we’re experiencing.”

Keeping things lyrically vague and open to interpretation she covers balancing creativity with parenthood and past mistakes being clarified by hindsight. Van Etten reflects on the past and holds hope for the future while dealing with uncertainty in uncertain times.

The album spends time trying to define the undefinable, “It could’ve been anything / I didn’t feel anything” (“Anything”). Lines like “Hardly see what’s next to you / can’t you see I’m trying to get through?” in “Headspace” and “never something was here / turning over my mind / jumping on tenuous time” in “Come Back” are filled with a hazy cloud of confusion.

The songs build big and boisterous while Van Etten’s words get bit off and sentences cut in half as though a distraction pulls her attention to the next song.

Collective trauma is difficult to grasp and even harder to express, that precariousness leads to a mistier and more mysterious album from an artist known for her, at times, brutally honest life lessons.