Hayden Anhedönia has spoken candidly about the commercial pressures that shape her work as Ethel Cain. “This is my livelihood… I do have to find the compromise of, we put out an album, I tour it, I make a pop song or two,” she acknowledged in a recent interview. This negotiation between artistic and business demands is mirrored in her music’s ongoing tension between a desire to connect with listeners and a need to challenge them. While the story of Ethel Cain is fundamentally human—navigating love and betrayal—experiencing it can feel like an endurance test. On Willoughby Tucker, songs routinely stretch past six minutes, with one, “Waco, Texas,” running to an unstructured 15 minutes. The album’s pace is glacial, its palette funereal.
The uneasy coexistence of beauty and torment defines the record. As Anhedönia sings on the pastoral folk track “Nettles,” “To love me is to suffer me.” The song captures a moment of fleeting fantasy, in which Cain imagines a future with the critically injured Tucker before reality intrudes. With its lush imagery and sweet delusion, the scene recalls John Everett Millais’ painting of Ophelia drifting downstream before her death. This sense of drowning is fittingly captured by the subsequent track, “Willoughby’s Interlude,” a stormy instrumental of drones and heavy breathing.
Perhaps the most compelling frictions in the Ethel Cain universe, however, exist not in the music but in the relationships between the character, her creator, and their shared audience. With growing celebrity comes scrutiny, as Anhedönia learned when her old, offensive online posts resurfaced, challenging the expectation that artists serve as beacons of moral clarity. While she cannot be expected to lead anyone into the light, one might hope for more than just darkness. There is something telling in how her grim, sweeping visions of rural America have been embraced, presenting the country’s heartland as a spooky diorama that validates assumptions about the bleakness of life there.
This dynamic comes to mind during the album’s 15-minute closer, “Waco, Texas.” The title is loaded, but Waco serves more as a signifier for religious zealotry and violent demise than as a specific subject. While Anhedönia seems to be reaching for a grandiose concluding statement, it is a modest couplet that resonates most: “I’ve been picking names for our children/You’ve been wondering how you’re gonna feed them.” An economic marvel, this line is packed with more hope, dread, and disaffection than the quarter-hour of material surrounding it, proving that an intimate home movie can be more powerful than a big-budget film.
