Ethel Cain has always possessed a preternatural gift to make her songs feel deeply lived in. With her debut album ‘Preacher’s Daughter’, the Southern gothic-pop outsider – real name Hayden Silas Anhedönia – crafted an expansive, open road epic of longing and self-discovery that culminated in her doomed heroine’s murder and cannibalisation at the hands of her lover. It was dark, twisted and brutally beautiful.
As her fan base rapidly expanded while she rose to mainstream-adjacent fame, Anhedönia spoke openly about her struggles with celebrity, including the “irony epidemic” that degraded her art through online jokes and memes. Last month, social media posts were dug up from her past, some of which included racial slurs, which she called a “smear campaign” while admitting to a “shameful” time in which she tried to be as “inflammatory and controversial as possible”.
So when she released her standalone album ‘Perverts’ earlier this year, an unsettling collection of droning slowcore soundscapes, it felt like a quiet test to see which fans would stick around. ‘Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You’ makes a return to the small town Americana intimacy of her debut, serving as a prequel chapter in which Ethel Cain navigates her first love.
With tracks ranging anywhere between five and 15 minutes, a lifetime of backstory is suffused into sprawling narratives; rarely are first loves recollected with such confronting honesty in all their ugly insecurities and existential fears. “Don’t ask me why I hate myself / As I’m circling the drain,” she deflects with a tone of paralysing anxiety on the spectral ‘Tempest’. On the equally lamentful ‘Janie’, Cain mourns her love’s slow departure atop a classic electric guitar riff: “I can see the end in the beginning of everything / and in it, you don’t want me.”
The linear storytelling of ‘Preacher’s Daughter’ drifts into something more ambiguous here, zoning in and out of deep ruminations. But there’s a distinct sonic throughline in the fuzzy distortion of lingering guitar chords, detuned piano notes and hollowed drumbeats. Instrumental tracks like ‘Willoughby’s Theme’ and ‘Radio Towers’ also share some of the emotional load, as distant synths carve space for quiet contemplation. Meanwhile, big alt-pop moments like ‘American Teenager’ remain elusive, with the dreamy ‘Fuck Me Eyes’ being the closest we get to those soaring highs again.
As her voice echoes into the open expanse, Ethel Cain’s pre-determined fate lingers heavy. While this album might require more time spent between the lines, ‘Preacher’s Daughter’ will also gain new layers of meaning. In her fearless quest to love and be loved, Ethel Cain’s is a story worth rooting for in life and death.
