I remember when I thought Ethel Cain was just a lovely singer. “What incisive lyrics,” I thought, while listening to her breakthrough 2021 single “Crush”. “What bewitching instrumentation.” Now, two albums and countless hours lost to Tumblr, Reddit and Cain’s own Wiki database later, I can never be so innocent again. She still makes captivating music, but I am now firmly convinced that she is as much – if not more – an author as she is a musician.
This has become particularly evident on Cain’s new album Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You, released today (August 8). It arrives as the narrative prequel to 2022 dark Americana project Preacher’s Daughter, and the literal follow-up to pink noise drone EP Perverts, released earlier this year. Sonically, the new release sits somewhere between these two projects, leaning more into the ‘alt’ side of her discography with shoegaze-tinged slowcore tracks that regularly swell beyond the six-minute mark. There are still glimpses of the anti-pop star she was once expected to be in nostalgic folk single “Nettles” and 80s synth-pop highlight “Fuck Me Eyes”. But, overall, Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You feels closer to a cinematic soundtrack than a standalone album.
Indeed, it is in continuing the beloved storytelling of Preacher’s Daughter that the new album really gets interesting. But, before we begin to scale the Ethel Cain iceberg, let’s make one thing crystal clear: Ethel Cain doesn’t really exist. Aside from being her artist alias, Cain is the fictional character created by singer-songwriter Hayden Anhedönia, and the protagonist of a morbid, gothic American drama set in the small town of Shady Grove, Alabama. It is important to remember this distinction, given a recent attempt to conflate the subject matter of the Cain Universe with the views of Anhedönia herself, among other things.
Now, let’s bring you up to speed on where Preacher’s Daughter left us: a 20-year old Cain, the daughter of an evangelical preacher who abused her as a child (“Family Tree” and “Hard Times”), finds herself on the run after her boyfriend Logan is killed by police while robbing a bank (“Western Nights”). She is soon picked up by a man named Isaiah Abram (“Thoroughfare”), who proceeds to force her into sex work and drug her (“Gibson Girl”). In Preacher’s Daughter’s narrative climax, “Ptolomea”, Isaiah kills and cannibalises Cain, with the album’s remaining tracks chronicling her journey into the afterlife.
Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You takes place around five years before the tragic events of Preacher’s Daughter, focusing on Cain’s high school romance with the titular Tucker. This “natural blood-stained blonde” love interest was previously depicted in Preacher’s Daughter track “A House In Nebraska”, referring to the abandoned shack in which they spent time together and in which Cain describes him as “the only thing I’ve ever truly loved in this wretched life”. Today’s album introduces new characters into the Cain-verse, including Cain’s best friend Janie and object of jealousy Holly Reddick, as well as addressing perhaps the biggest question raised by Preacher’s Daughter: Why did Tucker leave Cain?
Below, we travel to Shady Grove, Alabama, in an attempt to decipher five key lore drops from Ethel Cain’s latest album, Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You.
Though absent from Preacher’s Daughter, Janie’s story has long been part of the Cain ecosystem. First developed as early as 2022, the track “Janie” was reportedly cut from the debut album, but here we’re introduced to her in the devastating opening track.
Janie is Ethel’s only real childhood friend, the kind of bond born in innocence, before any rot sets in. But with time comes decay, and Janie outgrows Ethel, stepping into a relationship and a life that Ethel isn’t part of. Ethel opens the wound in the track, picking at flesh to ooze yearning lyrics like “she was my girl first”, “please don’t leave me” and prayer-like repetitions of “I will wait.” Janie is the first in a lineage of loss for Ethel – and maybe the one who mattered most. (TM)
A new character in the Cain-verse, Holly Reddick is formally introduced in the track “Fuck Me Eyes.” In the song, Holly is viewed through Ethel’s lens as the stereotypical “town slut” – a sexually liberated girl scorned by her community. A classmate of both Ethel and Willoughby Tucker, Holly’s perceived promiscuity stirs up complicated feelings of jealousy, fascination and repressed desire in Ethel.
In a press release, Anhedönia frames Holly’s so-called “sluttiness” as a misunderstood coping mechanism born from a fractured home life, a strict father, and fabricated town gossip. Holly’s character is the contradiction of Southern girlhood: as Anhedönia puts it, she is “the girl everyone simultaneously can’t stand and wants to be.” Her story reflects one of the central themes in Cain’s narrative: how small-town mythologies distort girlhood, and how the girls within them are never quite who they’re made out to be. (TM)
While Ethel’s abuse at the hands of her father formed the driving narrative force of Preacher’s Daughter, we are provided insight into Willoughby’s own troubled relationships with his parents on the new record. This is introduced in the lead single “Nettles”, on which Ethel describes how Willoughby is scared of ending up like “that picture on the wall” – which, on “Dust Bowl”, is revealed to be his father. Given the lines “Smoking that shit your daddy smoked in Vietnam”, it appears that Tucker senior is a Vietnam War veteran who has turned to drugs to deal with his PTSD. Meanwhile, in exclusive Genius annotations for “Knock At The Door”, Ethel shares that Willoughby’s father was eventually sent to a nearby penitentiary to ‘recover’ from his illnesses.
This intergenerational trauma seems to be why Ethel says she and Willoughby have grown up “too quick”. Yet while Cain longs for family and connection in the wake of her abuse, Willoughby lives in fear of repeating history. Already, the foundations of their tragic break-up are starting to take shape. (SPM)
Ethel had previously ‘telegraphed’ the significance of radio towers to the Cain-verse back in 2023, posting morse code text on her now-deleted Tumblr page, which translated to: “DO YOU THINK RADIO TOWERS MAKE DEALS WITH THE WIND TO BLOW OVER AND SPARE THEM?” Then, in 2024, Ethel uploaded a hand-drawn picture of a broadcasting tower to her Instagram story along with the text: “I had to”.
The track itself is one of three instrumentals on the project, featuring a faint piano melody and mechanical beeping swallowed in Perverts-esque pink noise and gushes of wind. Given that “Radio Towers” follows “Knock At The Door”, in which it is suggested that Willoughby’s drug addiction has advanced, it appears that this beeping might refer to that of a hospital heart monitor. Meanwhile, in the track’s visualiser, shots depict a tornado drawing closer. On some level, then, the image of a radio tower emerges as a metaphor for Ethel’s impending isolation, buffeted by the tempest of real life and broadcasting messages alone into the abyss. (SPM)
And, finally, we arrive at the biggest question of all. Going into the project, it had already been revealed that Willoughby and Cain’s relationship ended when a tornado hit Shady Grove, with Cain lamenting in Diary of a Preacher’s Daughter that she let him go out alone, but the exact details of this were left ambiguous.
However, while many fans were expecting a big climactic break-up between the two, it appears the reality is something more insidious. Throughout the album, Ethel regularly hints that her relationship with Willoughby is doomed to fail, with lyrics like “Eighth grade death pact”, “You’ll go fight a war, I’ll go missing” and “Grew up hard fell off harder”. This all comes to a head in the closing tracks “Tempest”, which appears to speak on the aforementioned tornado from Willoughby’s perspective, and “Waco, Texas”, in which Cain sings: “I’ve been picking names for our children, You’ve been wondering how you’re gonna feed them”. The couple have weathered the storms of childhood trauma and addiction together, but it appears to be the tempest of real life that tears them apart, with Willoughby agonising over how he’ll be able to provide for their family and whether he’ll pass the scars left by his father onto his children.
This is supported by a now-deleted Tumblr post from Cain about the title of the final track, which draws parallels with the real-world siege on the Branch Davidians cult compound in Waco, Texas in 1993, ending with 86 cult members being engulfed in flames. She writes: “As Ethel and Willoughby fall in love, they find themselves blinded to the rest of the world […] But eventually, the real world comes knocking and everything goes up in flames. I just like the parallels of their relationship and the events of the Branch Davidians. Ethel sees him as being this beautiful, enamouring God and she’s deeply in love with him, but in the end she realises he’s just a broken boy and they’re both too far gone.”
Here, Ethel’s closing lyrics echo back: “Love is not enough in this world”. Rather than them falling out of love, it was the pressures of the outside world that forced Ethel and Willoughby’s relationship to end – and those usually are the most painful. (SPM)
Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You is out now.
