Ethel Cain Unveils Dreamy Prequel, Navigating Past Desires
New album ‘Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You’ explores teenage love and yearning, contrasting with debut’s raw intensity.
Ethel Cain, the sonic avatar of Hayden Anhedönia, offers a contemplative journey with her latest release, “Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You.” This prequel album delves into themes of adolescent love and melancholy, presenting a stark contrast to the visceral trauma explored in her 2022 debut, “Preacher’s Daughter.”
A Shift from Nightmare to Restless Fantasy
“Willoughby Tucker” trades the confrontational screams of its predecessor for a more subdued, dreamlike atmosphere. While “Preacher’s Daughter” was likened to a haunting nightmare, this new work evokes the “desperate, gnawing fantasy” that follows profound emotional distress. The album’s unhurried, meditative quality invites listeners into a personal dreamscape, characterized by hazy logic and potent emotion.
Anhedönia established the Ethel Cain persona as a vehicle for processing personal experiences that might otherwise be too revealing. As she explained in a recent interview with The New York Times‘s “Popcast,” it’s “a way to talk about the things that I’ve been through… without doing it in a way where everyone in my life is going to call me and be like, ‘Why are you talking about this?'”
Recalling Teenage Yearning and First Love
The prequel album revisits Cain‘s formative years, focusing on her relationship with her first love, Willoughby, first hinted at in “A House In Nebraska” from “Preacher’s Daughter.” The narrative follows Ethel‘s enduring affection for Willoughby, even after his departure and her own reflection from beyond the grave.
Cain describes her creative process as akin to “one big long piece of lined notebook paper that I’m just scribbling on to this day,” stemming from a childhood marked by homeschooling and limited social interaction. This immersive, internal world-building allows new characters like Hazel and Janie to appear and fade, serving the emotional arc of individual songs.
Anhedönia’s lyrical prowess shines through on “Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You,” with tracks like the sweeping ballad “Nettles” exploring insecurities and fears within love. The song features the poignant lines, “Lay me down where the trees bend low / Put me down where the greenery stings / I can hear them singing / To love me is to suffer me.”
The sprawling 15-minute closer, “Waco, TX,” also delivers devastating lines, including, “I’ve been picking names for our children / You’ve been wondering how you’re gonna feed them.”
The album’s pace is deliberately languid, potentially influenced by Cain‘s experimental drone project, “Perverts.” Despite its introspective nature and extended instrumental passages, “Willoughby Tucker” is seen as a challenging yet rewarding work, rich in longing, loss, and desire, and distinct within the contemporary music landscape.
Navigating Controversy and Artistic Growth
Cain has recently addressed past controversies, including offensive teenage posts for which she apologized, and earlier comments about her fanbase. She has expressed acceptance of her inability to control public reception, stating, “At the end of the day, you make what you make and you put it out and people can do what they want with it.”
This sentiment appears reflected in the self-assured, though still complex, presentation of “Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You,” an album that, while not seeking to alienate, remains a thorny and layered artistic statement.
This newfound comfort with her artistic expression aligns with the album’s exploration of personal history. As of July 2024, streaming platforms indicate that listener engagement with artists like Ethel Cain continues to grow, with over 15 million monthly listeners on Spotify globally tuning into artists exploring genre-bending sounds and deeply personal narratives.
