By contrast, we have no clue where Hayden Anhedönia, the breakout indie sensation behind Ethel Cain, is headed. A few years ago, she became an instant critical darling and out-of-place main pop girl after the release of her Southern Gothic concept album Preacher’s Daughter hit the Billboard charts, TikTok and music nerd spheres simultaneously. Since the release of that album – written about a character who endures familial abuse in rural, religious America, runs away, and falls into the arms of men who hurt and eventually kill her – she’s attracted controversy from Fox News (for her comments about killing CEOs), the broader public (over a rediscovered offensive Twitter account), and from her own fans (who didn’t expect her to start 2025 by releasing a ninety-minute drone EP, Perverts). Anhedönia has discovered fame at lightspeed since introducing the character Ethel Cain. But by her sophomore album, Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You, you wouldn’t be able to tell. After all, she hasn’t touched the story of Ethel Cain since 2022, and this is merely a sequel.
Or, more accurately, it’s a prequel: the majority of it is dedicated to Ethel’s high school love affair with the titular Willoughby Tucker. Willoughby was a known entity on her debut album, characterized in the album’s most sentimental moments as the one that got away, the ex-boyfriend that Ethel spends the rest of her life yearning for. While this album fits perfectly into the storyline of its predecessor, it doesn’t emulate its quasi-linear structuring. Instead, it’s more of a zoom-in. Where Preacher’s Daughter moves from story to story, character to character, scenario to scenario, many of the songs on this album center around thoughts or trauma responses or fears. About a third of the album is instrumental, allowing the album to anchor itself in atmosphere, and the rest is guitar-bound and slow-moving and reflective and exposed.
It’s still far from a clean stylistic break. Some good ol’ Preacher’s Daughter-like slowcore and Americana sticks around, as do a couple of acoustic, even lo-fi-leaning cuts; these more direct and traditional songs, which serve to establish a narrative for the rest of the album to work within, are largely clustered at the beginning. Just like the debut, for example, the album introduces itself with a verse-chorus-verse synthpop anthem: “Fuck Me Eyes”. The one-two punch of this song and “Janie”, the album’s acoustic opener tinged with equal parts despair and desperate hope, re-introduce Ethel Cain as a deeply traumatized young girl chasing any form of escape – codependent friendship and love, drugs, further abuse, pain.
Anhedönia’s greatest quality as an artist is her dexterity in storytelling – a skill she gained mass recognition for on Preacher’s Daughter, which has enough lore for a film trilogy and the instrumental grandiosity to match – but she takes that prowess in a different direction for much of this album after its opening moments, choosing to craft a story arc not through sweeping, self-conscious narratives but through meditative inner monologuing and abstract instrumentals. Ethel Cain travels across America over the span of years on the debut, but here the focus moves at walking pace and never leaves walking distance. “Nettles”, for example, sounds like it could be describing a single moment in someone’s head, the tiniest fraction of a second when romance and disbelief and self-hatred and terror all meld into the same feeling as you begin to know the first person you’ve ever believed in. As “Tempest” drones on and on, you become swallowed into Anhedönia’s world, not like you’re reading a good piece of fiction but like you’re holding your friend as they crumple in your arms and suddenly you viscerally know everything they’ve ever felt. Anhedönia has talked about writing books and directing movies about Ethel Cain, and Preacher’s Daughter plays like it could have been a manuscript first, but it’s immediately obvious that there’s no better medium for the story of Willoughby Tucker than an hour of music. Ethel Cain’s debut was a feat of artistry. This is a feat of musicianship.
Of course, Anhedönia still tells some stories in the good old-fashioned way, even if her lyricism is more shrouded than we’re used to. “Dust Bowl”, already a fan-favorite as a slowcore demo, gains a heavy shoegazing second half, making Ethel’s descriptions of puppy-love intimacy just as intense as they deserve without excising the dark undertones underpinning the whole endeavor. After this point in the album, things begin faltering: “A Knock at the Door” is a manifestation of pure post-traumatic anxiety, wherein Ethel tries to imagine Willoughby as her great defender against any “knocks at the door,” a role he clearly isn’t ready to take on; a barren instrumental then leads into “Tempest”, the finest moment on the album, a self-hating breakdown of drone-metal guitars and cries of “forever,” destruction swallowing her and Willoughby whole.
Knowing how Preacher’s Daughter and the Ethel Cain story ends – Willoughby Tucker missing in action and Ethel’s earthen body cannibalized by her final boyfriend, photos of her face on milk cartons – makes this failed attempt at healing so much more crushing. Throughout Preacher’s Daughter, until the end of her life and beyond, she continues to long after Willoughby Tucker, the boy who did not heal her but at least gave her hope in the possibility of healing.
It’s remarkable, then, that the album’s most unadulterated moments of clarity and even beauty are at its conclusion, the 15-minute diary-entry-esque gut-wrencher “Waco, Texas” wherein Ethel shakily comes to terms with her loss as her relationship crumbles in her hands. “When this is over,” she croons over slow-moving drums and reverbed guitars, “maybe then we’ll get some sleep.” She fights herself, trying desperately to hold on while letting go, trying to forgive herself while self-flagellating, trying to be the perfect partner while realizing that perfection will never be attainable. After she stops singing eleven minutes in, though, the guitars blare and she harmonizes perfectly with them and eventually it all settles into churchlike pad synths and a solo piano. There are so many complexities subsumed within love, within the act of loving, there is sacrifice and codependence and unhealing and healing and suffering, and at the core it is still love, it is only love, there is nothing else. No matter how it ends, there will always be love.
On “Sun Bleached Flies”, the penultimate track on Preacher’s Daughter, Ethel speaks from heaven, where she’s free from every form of pain except for yearning: “I’m still praying for that house in Nebraska / By the highway, out on the edge of town / Dancing with the windows open, I can’t let go when something’s broken / It’s all I know and it’s all I want now”. The afterlife still isn’t as beautiful to her as Willoughby, as the moments of hope she seized onto when everything else had fallen apart. And so, with open arms, she waits for him.