The summer album includes songs of eight, 10 or 15 minutes duration, and in it there are reflections as restless as these (translated from English into Spanish): “Don’t ask me why I hate myself while I slide through the drain. / Because death takes too long, and I can’t wait.” At least it is the album of the moment for critics of some specialized media, which have raised it with five stars over five. New Musical Express He points out that we are facing “a gloomy artistic journey, but beautiful.” “A visionary talent,” Far Out Magazine. Others contain euphoria, such as Pitchforkwhich awards to work a 6.7 out of 10: “Listening to it can feel as an exercise of resistance or a test of faith.” Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You It was published on August 8 and is signed by Ethel Cain (Tallahassee, Florida, 27 years old), a transsexual singer to which thousands of followers profess a morbid cult because they see their gloomy music stimulating and their torn and dark personality, an alternative to the colorful Eras de Taylor Swift.
But who Ethel Cain is. You could already put the characters that describe in their songs in a chapter of the series Euphoria: A young woman in exploration of gender identity with love for toxic relationships, with episodes of anxiety crisis, cases of violence and addictions. Cain has passed through some of these situations. Would also fit movies like Carrie, The killing from Texas or in books by Stephen King or David Foster Wallace. Ethel Cain is not a pop star in the style of Taylor Swift, Sabrina Carpenter or Benson Boone. She doesn’t want to be a stadium pop celebrity. However, it exposes concerns and brokenness with which many young people feel relieved.
The American artist discovers in her songs the open and bubbing wounds that never stop suppurating in her country, and less with the current president: religious fanaticism, the atavistic terrors of the south, an insane relationship with sex, racism and in general everything that can happen in a club of striptease of a lost people of deep America.
Cain is actually called Hayden Silas Anhedönia, he was born in Tallahassee, capital of Florida, but grew in Perry, a small place of 7,000 inhabitants in the same state. A childhood passed that she defines as “oppressive”: her parents are baptist (the father acts as a shepherd in a church) and her and her three brothers were instructed in religious cult. The South Baptist Church is the most influential Protestant congregation in the United States and traditionally voter of the Republican Party. Although there have been advances, especially with the arrival of the #MeToo movement as of 2017, the woman occupies a secondary role with respect to man.
When he turned 12 Cain informed his mother that he was gay. They immediately sent it to religious therapy. Meanwhile, Cain developed artistically: he sang in the church of his father’s church and attended theater courses. With 18 years he returned to his birthplace, Tallahassee, to study at Florida State University. As soon as he was there, he preferred to free himself from his strict education in Perry and was lost by Gothic clubs cramming with drugs. With 20 years he declared Trans on his Facebook and Hayden Silas Anhedönia began to walk his alter ego Musical, Ethel Cain. After interesting songs, in 2022 the talent was decorcinated: Preacher’s Daughterhis first job, passionate to the select critic and began to accumulate followers. There are 76 minutes of murky and ecstatic music, beautiful in her gloom, a kind of wool of the Gothic king singing funeral songs strangled by a mantle of electric guitars. The album that Nick Cave would love.
The album tells the story of a southern girl and the relationship, almost always turbulent, with her boyfriends: violence, abuse, drugs, God, murders, psychological manipulation and even cannibalism. An appropriate truculent script for a series. We also find pop, although in its own way: the accessible song American Teenager became an unexpected success and entered the publication list Rolling Stone so -called The 50 most inspiring LGTBQ songs in history. American Teenager It could happen as a Taylor Swift theme if it had tattooed a crucifix in the throat with the word “please” (please). But that already did Cain. With Preacher’s Daughter On the platforms, Cain served as a bustle of powerful bands with female leadership such as Florence and the Machine or Boygenius.
What happened next is that Cain smelled the insidious effluviums of fame and in January 2025 he autoboicote and published an impossible job: Perverts (Perverted), a 90 -minute album composed of ghostly sounds, dark minimalism, defined keyboards, enervating circular sounds and parsimonious and deformed chords to John Cage, an auditory experience for which wide tolerance is needed. On this work, Cain declared: “It is a pirañas album, my penance,” for having achieved success with the previous one.
At that time, Cain lived in an abandoned church in an almost uninhabited people in Indiana. Although he was advised to be convenient to launch his career a move to Los Angeles or New York, she preferred the rural alabama, where he currently resides. Last July, a month before its new album was published, Cain’s artistic project was able to suffer a serious recession, since the singer had to manage her own Karla Sofía Gascón case. A couple of anonymous accounts of the social network X rescued old messages from Cain where it supported the construction of a wall to stop the Latin community (Trump’s dream), dressed in a shirt with the phrase “legalize the incest” and used racist expressions. Immediately, Cain recognized the truth of the texts in a statement, said he wrote them when he was 19 years old and apologized alleging that he lived a time when he fell “in a subculture online that prioritized attracting attention at all costs. “” He intended to be as provocative and controversial as possible. I would have said (and used to say) anything, and about anyone, to get attention and, ultimately, make my friends laugh, ”he added. He also considered that behind the appearance of his old comments there was“ an attack towards her for being a trans person. “In a podcast Recent of The New York Times, He declared: “With my identity at this political moment in the United States, you know that people are not going to like them well. People queer They are still attacked with all kinds of defamatory material. ”
The artist managed to silence the controversy with the statement and a few weeks Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You, a job of 10 songs and 73 minutes (long, but not as much as the others) that works narratively as a prequel to the first, The daughter of predicater (Preacher’s Daughter). Willoughby Tucker It offers a narcotic rhythm to the Red House Painters, a hurtful feeling and a supplicant voice that sometimes reminds Tori Amos and others to Dolores O’Riordan without Gorgoritos. Although sometimes it is uncomfortable, the album gives off beauty, with its subtle country arrangements, with a song that can even be radiable (Fuck me Eyes) And with a pone end, Waco, Texas, A song about condemned lovers that starts numb and is raising intensities until it reaches 15 minutes and where she sings surrendered statements such as: “Love is not enough in this world, but I still believe in Nebraska’s dream. / Because I prefer to die than be anything but your girl.”
The album is receiving extra advertising after a week ago Wool of the King published a song, All About Ethel, where he throws Pullitas to Cain. The rivalry between the two artists comes long and has been fueled right now. Cain responded to Del Rey’s song with this message: “Lana del Rey has blocked me on Instagram.” Meanwhile, Nicki Minaj is delighted with the dispute and gives her opinion on her social networks. All very entertaining.
The proof that Ethel Cain begins to be something important internationally is that tickets for their concerts in Barcelona (November 7) and Madrid (November 8) have already been exhausted. There can be nothing better to enter the fall like the disturbing ballads of this sad girl.