Hayden Anhedรถnia’s Daughter of Cain saga continues with her latest release under the Ethel Cain name, set as the prequel album to “Preacher’s Daughter,” “Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You.” With “Preacher’s Daughter” ending in her main character, Ethel Cain, cannibalized and still singing from the afterlife, this new album takes us back in time to follow a younger Cain while she navigates teenage love and the devastation that often follows her.
The album opens with “Janie,” a song filled with yearning vocals and clouded by a heavy atmosphere. It feels more stripped back than the rest of the album, yet like every other track, the air is haunted by narrative.
Like songs “American Teenager” and “Crush” that live on her previous albums, “Willoughby Tucker’s” second single, “Fuck Me Eyes,” acts as the album’s representative for a synth-pop hit. As the lyrical story delves into her envy surrounding another girl, “I’ll never be that kind of angel,” the song possesses qualities that seem reminiscent of “Bette Davis Eyes” from the cult classic drama series “Twin Peaks.”
The lead single off of “Willoughby Tucker,” “Nettles,” is an eight-minute sepia-seeped folk ballad whose progression flows effortlessly. A weightless feeling persists throughout the whole of the song, even after lyrics like “the doctors gave you until the end of the night / But not ’til daylight” and “to love me is to suffer me” reflect on mortality and grief. The song’s tenderness resembles that of an unintentional lens flare appearing on a picture of a loved one.
The three interludes, “Willoughby Tucker’s Theme,” “Willoughby’s Interlude” and “Radio Towers,” carefully placed throughout the track list, offer themselves as ambient connectors between the progression of the narrative woven into the album. It is also possible that “Twin Peaks” bleeds a bit more into this album as inspiration, matching song titles once again with “Willoughby Tucker’s Theme” and “Laura Palmer’s Theme.”
“Dust Bowl” might just be my favorite track lyrically. The song oozes Anhedรถnia’s distinctive witchy-Americana style and offers a gradual sinking into despair rather than a sudden collapse. The distinct cadence in her voice when she reaches the second verse with the lines “Pretty boy / Scared of the rain, by God / Tend to the row of your violets” decompose any last bit of sanity I had been clutching, prior to starting the song. Just after the two-minute mark, faint sounds similar to that of windchimes can be heard in the background, perhaps meant to anticipate the storm that strikes the town during “Tempest.”
“Tempest,” the second-to-last track, leans heavily into slowcore and the darkness surrounding Cain’s eventual fate. The song itself feels infested with rot while the lyrics exhibit an almost suicidal self-loathing. Atmospherically, it presents itself as the darkest song on the album.
The project closes with “Waco, Texas,” a 15-minute-long goodbye that left me completely too aware of how fleeting life really is. Most Ethel Cain songs Anhedรถnia produces are rusted over with anguish, suffering and emotionally draining narrative, but “Waco, Texas” possesses an especially distorting funereal quality. The repetition of “forever” that appears just after the eight-minute mark is a plea that makes the song all the more devastating. In my eyes, “Waco, Texas” paints a perfect sonic picture of the decaying Americana landscape.
Maybe it’s just the fact that Anhedรถnia announced “Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You” is the end of Ethel Cain’s story, but “Waco, Texas” feels like the perfect heartbreak to end this chapter.