Ethel Cain
Willoughby Tucker, I'll Always Love You
Daughters of Cain/AWAL
Released 08/08/25
Just five months after she released the experimental standalone recording Perverts, Hayden Silas Anhedönia—more popularly known by the pseudonym Ethel Cain—announced that her second studio album Willoughby Tucker, I'll Always Love You was set to arrive August 8th. The formal follow-up to Preacher’s Daughter (2022) originally titled Preacher’s Wife, the new LP functions as the thematic prequel to her debut album and the second installment of a planned album trilogy. The album’s narrative revisits the genesis of the protagonist character Ethel Cain’s relationship with Willoughby Tucker, who is referenced in “A House in Nebraska” from Preacher’s Daughter.
In conjunction with announcing the new album, Cain unveiled the project’s daydream-inducing lead single “Nettles.” “This song and the last track on the record were both written the same week, the very first week I moved into the house in Alabama where I finished Preacher’s Daughter,” Cain explains in an official statement. “Fuck Me Eyes” surfaced as the album’s second single in early July.
“You have to accept when you make a business out of your passion, it is going to fundamentally forever change the way that you create,” Cain tells The New York Times. “You only get one debut. I will never make a record the way I made “Preacher’s Daughter,” which has been heartbreaking over the past couple years of realizing that.
Willoughby Tucker was a very different process. A lot more frustration, a lot more heartbreak, a lot emptier. I cried every day that I was finishing it because I just thought, “Will I ever love this again?” The only thing I have ever truly, deeply, unequivocally loved in my whole life was telling stories and making music. And the fact that I feel nothing for making music right now, for this portion, that was hard.”
To support the album’s release, Cain will embark upon the largely sold-out North American, UK and European “Willoughby Tucker Forever” tour that commences August 12th in Seattle and concludes November 9th in Lisbon.
Listen/Watch: