With Sharon Van Etten, intensity is a given. Over her first four studio albums – plus a number of earlier, self-released outings before them – the New Jersey native set herself up as a master of the burnished seethe and the loud churn. Notionally working in indie rock, she anatomised a series of really bad relationship decisions with heavily pregnant understatement, while her music did the lashing and bucking. Rolling Stone declared Van Etten’s fourth album, 2014’s Are We There, “one of the great albums of the century”. One of her merch T-shirts still declares “Every time the sun comes up I’m in trouble”, a lyric from that record. You kind of wish the T-shirt took on another line: “I washed your dishes, but I shit in your bathroom.” As well as being full-on, Van Etten is also sharp, and highly quotable.

Although guitars were Van Etten’s chosen medium, the term “indie rock” doesn’t quite do justice to the way she and her band would turn the screws on her songs, piling on guitars, harmonies and effects-laden vocals. Tonight, she is accompanied by four band members, including long-time keyboard player and backing vocalist Heather Woods Broderick, whose voice merges with Van Etten’s with poignancy and power.

This balmy Tuesday evening in Cambridge is the final stop on Van Etten’s latest UK tour, a jaunt that has included a landmark Glastonbury performance, and another guest slot at the festival, duetting with actor-turned-jazzbo Jeff Goldblum on Irving Berlin’s Let’s Face the Music and Dance (she is also on his forthcoming album). Remind Me Tomorrow, Van Etten’s fifth album, released in January, is turning into one of the year’s most stubborn earworms, its songs more than standing the test of time and the din of new playlists.

There are quieter moments in Van Etten’s discography too, where the influence of country-rock and the time she spent in Tennessee would creep in. (She actually called an early album I Miss Tennessee.) But expressing spectacularly inclement internal weather is where Van Etten excels. Her backstory bears repeating, if only to underline how far she has come – a story that has parallels with the growing feminist realisation of recent years that dark, ugly things like abuse and coercive control can now be challenged publicly.

Van Etten spent years in a relationship with a partner whose dysfunctions extended to smashing up her new guitar when he found out she was secretly playing gigs. It is lazy to assume that all female artists write autobiographically, but in this case, there are clear and cherishable links between Van Etten’s lived experience and her songwriting.

Between Are We There and Remind Me Tomorrow, Van Etten took a four-year break from music to retrain as a counsellor, in part to better equip herself to help fans who came to her with their own tales of abusive relationships.

She also fell in love – with her then drummer and now partner Zeke Hutchins. She had a baby, who is now two. That story is told magnificently on I Told You Everything, which deserves not a T-shirt but the full Jenny Holzer billboard. “Sitting at the bar, I told you everything,” it begins in the encore, with Van Etten fingering the song’s opening Sympathy for the Devil-ish chords on keyboards, “You said, ‘Holy shit, you almost died… I had no idea.’” The song, of course, never tells us what the “everything” consists of: that’s the kind of writer Van Etten is.

If anything, then, Van Etten’s live performances are now even more full-on than before. Tonight, everyone in her band is in regulation black, with Van Etten sporting a lamé top by way of light relief. The lights glow hellish red at the start, and a swirl of menacing electronics announces Jupiter 4, a song from this latest, assured album. The song shares its name with a gutsy, thrumming synthesiser, just one of the new instruments Van Etten turned to in the process of recording Remind Me Tomorrow. “Remind me tomorrow” is, of course, the dismissal we all click on when we are too busy to update software – a situation Van Etten often found herself in as a new parent with a lot of irons in the fire: a film score for the film Strange Weather (directed by Katherine Dieckmann, and released in 2016), her own new album, an acting role in Netflix’s The OA and an appearance in the last series of Twin Peaks. She looks set to continue with acting, having recently been cast in a forthcoming film called Never, Rarely, Sometimes, Always, directed by Eliza Hittman (Beach Rats).

A gale of electronics echoes around the Junction, the mood just on the correct side of goth. Van Etten sings low, until suddenly, the covers come off her diva voice. “Baby, baby, baby, I’ve been searching for you,” she bellows, full of anguish, “I want to be in love.” Although there is a certain windspeed Van Etten shares with contemporary artists like Florence and the Machine, there are times tonight – chiefly, the many 80s-inspired standouts from Remind Me Tomorrow – when she harks back to hard-hitting vintage pop singers like Pat Benatar.

Where before, Van Etten tended to use her voice as another instrument, adding its hues to the slow-build saturation of her music, now she puts it front and centre. It is uncommon for an established artist’s new songs to so far exceed their old, but Van Etten is done with being a wallflower. The video for Remind Me Tomorrow’s lead single, Comeback Kid, found her in intense mode; tonight, the drama of the song’s wheezing organ noises and huge drums are heightened further. Its close cousin, Seventeen, where Van Etten addresses her younger self, is another a standout from the album, where her rugged confidence in both vocals and storytelling really do bear out Bruce Springsteen comparisons. A stunning solo cover of Sinéad O’Connor’s song Black Boys on Mopeds, from the Irish singer’s 1987 debut album, draws hard on a young mother’s despair at the world she is living in. Tonight, between songs, Van Etten mourns the state of things, but preaches positivity.

Reinventions are a gamble, but the common thread linking her earlier rock phase and this latterday incursion of new sounds remains Van Etten’s singularity of focus. “I try to make eye contact with as many people as I can,” she tells the rapt audience.