{"id":130027,"date":"2025-08-08T21:11:09","date_gmt":"2025-08-08T21:11:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/130027\/"},"modified":"2025-08-08T21:11:09","modified_gmt":"2025-08-08T21:11:09","slug":"ethel-cain-willoughby-tucker-ill-always-love-you-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/130027\/","title":{"rendered":"Ethel Cain – Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You review"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ethel Cain used to be \u201ctoo tired to move, too tired to leave.\u201d Now, she\u2019s finally managed to get some rest, but she still \u201cdreams of violence.\u201d You might have a similar experience with the transition from Preacher\u2019s Daughter, Cain\u2019s excellent 2022 debut, to her new prequel album, Willoughby Tucker, I\u2019ll Always Love You. If you somehow managed to nod off while listening to Preacher\u2019s Daughter, that scream in \u201cPtolemaea\u201d would serve as a pretty hellish wake-up call. Willoughby Tucker doesn\u2019t have any guttural cries like that. In fact, its meditative, unhurried nature may cause your eyelids to droop a bit. That doesn\u2019t mean it\u2019s bland or boring, though\u2014far from it. Cain\u2019s albums have the power to conjure sleep because they consistently feel like wandering into someone else\u2019s dream, with all the hazy, uncanny logic that implies. If Preacher\u2019s Daughter was a nightmare, however, then Willoughby Tucker is the desperate, gnawing fantasy that descends after crying oneself into a restless daze.<\/p>\n

Willoughby Tucker, I\u2019ll Always Love You is the latest addition to the growing lore of Ethel Cain, a sort of avatar created by musician Hayden Anhed\u00f6nia as \u201ca way to talk about the things that I\u2019ve been through\u2026 without doing it in a way where everyone in my life is going to call me and be like, \u2018Why are you talking about this?’\u201d as she shared in a recent interview with The New York Times\u2018 Popcast<\/a>. Preacher\u2019s Daughter grappled with Anhed\u00f6nia\u2019s experiences with religious trauma and sexual violence, both of which were woven into a complicated tale that saw her fictional doppelg\u00e4nger killed and cannibalized by its final chapter. Willoughby Tucker takes a slightly gentler tack by going back in time to Ethel\u2019s teen years, which she spent with her first and only love, originally introduced in the Preacher\u2019s Daughter track \u201cA House In Nebraska.\u201d Willoughby eventually leaves Ethel in the proverbial off-screen of this grand saga, but she continues to pine for him even as she reflects on her life from beyond the grave.<\/p>\n

If all of this sounds like an escapist daydream conjured up by a lonely, goth-leaning kid, that\u2019s because it is. \u201cI did not have a lot of friends growing up\u2026 I was very homeschooled. I did not get out, and all I had to do was tell myself stories and get invested, and I\u2019ve never gone out of that,\u201d Cain told The New York Times. \u201cSo this is one big long piece of lined notebook paper that I\u2019m just scribbling on to this day.\u201d As listeners, we don\u2019t have access to all those connections. New characters like the seductive Hazel in this album\u2019s synth-heavy pop banger \u201cFuck Me Eyes\u201d or Ethel\u2019s best friend Janie in its shoegazey opening track often seem to emerge out of nowhere or melt away once their song is over, never to be heard from again.\u00a0<\/p>\n

All this extra-textual mythologizing can get a bit convoluted, especially as one plunges deeper into the intricacies of Cain\u2019s decades-long daydream\u2014one even she describes as \u201cpurely just entertainment for me.\u201d But it\u2019s also only one way to engage with her increasingly rich body of work. These characters mostly flit in and around the edges of the narrative, disappearing when they no longer serve the story or the emotion at its core. It\u2019s not the fictional arcs or the nitty-gritty of Ethel\u2019s relationships that linger, but the very real feelings of longing, loss, and desire that Anhed\u00f6nia has once again managed to capture in a manner that feels urgent, aching, and completely distinct from the rest of her peers.<\/p>\n