Ethel Cain
Preacher’s Daughter
Daughters of Cain
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Driving through the rural South, it’s sprawling, sun-scorched landscape dotted with peeling whitewashed church here, shot-up rusted-out car there, a house, fields, another house—haunting-looking and abandoned, a JESUS LOVES YOU billboard, and then maybe a gas station with a couple of guys in camo out front. A near-hypnosis can arise from what you might see next—what new cultural or picturesque gem—and how it might relate to some greater gestalt.
This sprawling sensibility is apparent on Ethel Cain’s debut album Preacher’s Daughter, where many of the songs average more than 6 minutes, but where you never descend into malaise because each new point of interest—floating vocals; a shocking, visceral lyric; a Springsteen-esque guitar solo—keeps you primed for what’s to come. As a whole, the album is a sweeping Southern Gothic, with all of the odd-but-relatable characters and beautiful sadness of a Carson McCullers or Flannery O’Connor novel, as well as all of the twisted, cruel tragedy.
Ethel Cain is the nom de plume and alter-ego—it will be important to make a distinction between the two—of Hayden Anhedönia, a 24-year-old raised in the Florida panhandle and currently living near an army post in rural Alabama. Her childhood was full of the stereotypical rural Southern accoutrements—a tightknit Baptist community where her father served as a deacon, homeschooling, and a strict sheltering from the Internet and pop culture save the occasional grisly crime show on her grandparents’ TV.
In her mid-teens, she came out as gay and, as she said in an interview with Them, “everyone thought I was a freak.” She escaped to Tallahassee in hopes of attending film school, immersed herself in hard drugs and the local goth and electronic scenes, and emerged from the period of dysphoria with knowledge she was trans. Fortunately, it didn’t result in a complete family rift. “My family doesn’t necessarily approve and they’re not super keen on it, but they love me and I think that kind of trumps everything else,” she explained on the Artists Decoded podcast last year.
Ethel Cain, as a concept, was born as a way of dealing with trauma, a physical manifestation of an invisible wound. “Ethel Cain is neither a character, nor is she myself,” Anhedönia confided on the podcast. “It’s kind of like cutting off a cancerous piece of the body and then not killing it and kind of poking at it and watching to see where it goes from there.” She’d realized not long after moving out of her Christian community and out of the South (she lived in Indiana for a while after her stint in Tallahassee) that she had a lot to process.
“When I moved out, I was like I’m out of the church, I’m out of the South, I’m a free woman, a free bird,” she said. “But then it started to creep up and I was like, oh there’s a lot wrong here. And I realized that the aftershocks, the lingering effects of Christianity, were not going to be easily dealt with and forgotten.” Instead of letting it consume her, she decided to turn it into a project she first conceptualized as a film, but, because she couldn’t make an entire movie in her bedroom, she settled on creating what might be the soundtrack.
She began growing out her hair to her waist, wearing prairie-style dresses, and covering herself in stick-and-poke tattoos (the one on her neck simply begs, Please). On Instagram and in her music videos, a very specific yet eclectic aesthetic emerges, one that borrows from Christina’s World, horror movies on VHS, Gummo on dusty DVD, the creepy wood-paneled world of ’70s rec rooms, ghost-filled lithographs, mulleted heavy-metal seediness, and, of course, countless images of pious Christian femininity. And so the wound appears to be not only personal, but sociopolitical in the sense that Anhedönia is addressing, like all creators of the Southern Gothic, the long-festering intergenerational wound that is the American South.
Preacher’s Daughter begins with the slightly haunting “Family Tree (Intro),” on which ominous, spaced-apart bass notes serve as a backdrop to a grainy, staticky recording. A man with a southern accent—likely a televangelist—drones on about what a mother is: A mother is a very special thang, while simultaneously mentioning The Lord Jesus Christ (Anhedönia’s social media handle is MotherCain, and she seems to use it, albeit semi-ironically, in the way that Catholics refer to the head nun as Mother Superior; so, a sort of religious-themed “HBIC”). The gist of the staticky sermon, we soon gather, is the glorification of selfless, all-sacrificing femininity, and then it fades out and Anhedönia’s voice emerges loud, confident and crystal clear: “These crosses all over my body / Remind me of who I used to be.”
The next song, “American Teenager,” stands out in stark contrast as radio-friendly pop perfection. It’s a shimmering stadium anthem with wailing electric guitar and a soaring wind-blown chorus that mentions the high-school football team. Listen harder under the Taylor Swift-iness of it all, however, and the song deals with dark fodder, namely senseless war that preys heavily on young, poor, Southern men: “The neighbor’s brother came home in a box / But he wanted to go so maybe it was his fault / Another red heart taken by the American dream.” The song takes a personal turn, and we’re in church with the narrator, who’s drunk. “Jesus if you’re listening, let me handle my liquor / And Jesus if you’re there, why do I feel so alone in this room with you?”
“A House In Nebraska,” the following song, stands out as the album’s centerpiece. It begins with low, foreboding piano and tells the story of a beautiful coupling that ends with the man callously and abruptly leaving. The glimmers of shimmering teenage dream in the preceding song prove to be a mirage, replaced only by longing and deep-stinging rejection. “And I still call home that house in Nebraska / Where we found each other on a dirty mattress on the second floor,” the chorus soars but palpably aches. “And I feel so alone, I feel so alone out here,” she sings, the vocals floating and ethereal, hanging in that empty room of an empty home in that empty expanse of Nebraska. And then there’s the guitar solo, arriving as a surprise, echo-y and wailing and distinctly Springsteen in that way that mourns the working-class American dream.
On “Western Nights,” we’re introduced to Ethel Cain’s dangerous new love interest—“He’s never looked more beautiful / On his Harley in the parking lot / Breaking into the ATMs / Sleeping naked when it gets too hot.” This man starts bar fights and shows his love “through shades of black and blue,” and Cain seems to know all too well that their love is unhealthy and codependent—“Clinging onto you like some love-blind addict.”
Next, the song “Family Tree” picks up the theme and lyrics of “Family Tree (Intro),” going back again to the tattooed crosses on Cain’s body, this time with a theme of baptism and salvation by a man—“So take me down to the river and bathe me clean / Put me on the back of your white horse to ride / All the way to the chapel, let you wash all over me.” It’s soulful and bluesy, with another guitar solo, sexy and howling this time in its feral wail.
Ever since meeting the guy on the Harley, Ethel Cain has been lamenting the absence of her dad in the lyrics. “Hard Times” is a slow, keening ballad that speaks of childhood sadness and trauma in vaguely sordid terms—“I was too young to notice / That some types of love could be bad.” The following song, “Thoroughfare,” presents a countrified, idealized version of America, and of adventurous love, after a man picks up Ethel off the side of a road. It’s a much-needed, yet in-denial, respite from the heavy subject matter presented thus far. Running over nine minutes, it’s a little too long, however, and comes across as more of a dragged-out distraction.
Anhedönia has spoken in interviews of a detached, dissociated strip-club phase in the life of Ethel Cain, and the cold, steely-sensual “Gibson Girl” reflects that—“Black leather and dark glasses / Pour another while I shake my ass.” Her voice reverberates with an alien-echo autotuned quality over R&B atmosphere as she sings of being “immoral in a stranger’s lap.”
The next song, “Ptolemaea,” named after a place in hell for traitors in Dante’s Inferno, is the most terrifying on the album. The sludgy, warbly near-whisper of a demon’s voice speaks over churning, grinding background—a buzz of flies. Anhedönia’s own voice replaces it, celestial in contrast, and soon there’s a conversation between angel and demon. And then a scream— “STOPPPPP”—and deconstructed heavy-metal elements. It’s here where Cain confronts the darkness head on, foreshadowing the inevitability of her untimely death. “There's nothing you can do / It's already been done,” the demon tells her.
“Ptolemaea” is followed by two eerie, gothic instrumental tracks—“August Underground” and “Televangelism”—representing her death. “Sun Bleached Flies” is a requiem, while the final song, “Strangers,” serves as a cascading lament for trusting a bad man—“When my mother sees me on the side / Of a milk carton in Wynn-Dixie’s dairy aisle / She’ll cry / And wait up for me.”
“Ethel is dead—end of the line,” Anhedönia has said. “So now it’s time to work backwards.” Which means that although her alter-ego is no more, killed off on her very first full-length album, there’s still plenty of work for the nom de plume aspect of Ethel Cain. She plans to explore on her next two albums the lives of Cain’s mother and grandmother, making the sweeping Southern epic all the more expansive. And I can’t hardly wait.
Notable Tracks: “American Teenager” | “Gibson Girl” | “A House In Nebraska” | “Western Nights”
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