FEATURE:
Spotlight
Ethel Cain
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IN terms of sound, image and story…
PHOTO CREDIT: High Snobiety/Justine Paquette
there are few artists more compelling, arresting and fascinating than Ethel Cain. The stage name of Hayden Silas Anhedönia, I will end with a review for the debut Ethel Cain album, Preacher’s Daughter. Released back in May, it is one of 2022’s most hypotonic and revelatory albums. Ethel Cian has already been tipped as one to watch this year. An artist who released such a distinct and phenomenal debut album, it is small wonder there is so much intrigue around her. I will come to that. There are a few interviews that I want to bring in. Apologies if it is a bit fragmented, but there is a lot to unpack and investigating regarding Ethel Cain and Anhedönia. High Snobiety about the remarkable and unforgettable Preacher’s Daughter:
“In a single word, the songs of Ethel Cain are melodrama: heightened emotions, all-consuming sound, and stories filled with tragedy and trauma. The promo photos for her album Preacher’s Daughter cast Cain as evocative and beguiling, one half a penitent woman conforming to the rigid patriarchal rule of the Southern United States, the other half a wayward pin-up girl with an air of doomed mystery – it’s no surprise the artist made her New York and Paris Fashion Week debuts this year walking for Eckhaus Latta and Miu Miu, respectively.
For all the intensity of the character she embodies, the woman behind Ethel Cain (real name Hayden Anhedönia) is almost disarmingly down-to-earth, as much of a girl next door as her stage persona is a girl gone bad. Born in Florida but now residing in Alabama, the native Southerner listens and observes as much as she acts, like a child in her room passing time by making up ghost stories. The restless creativity that drives her quickly shows itself, and her endless enthusiasm for creation itself, regardless of medium, bubbles up — she’s currently in the process of charting out the larger Cain family tree, not just as future albums but as an entire multimedia cycle which includes a novel and film. “Every project, whether it’s film or photography or music or a novel, it all starts with a story and a place and a setting and a character,” she explains. “It’s that seed that grows into different things. All these different mediums begin with a time and a smell and a temperature. I just close my eyes and imagine myself here, present in this world.”
Though Preacher’s Daughter exhibits a natural gift for catchy hooks and direct storytelling, Cain approaches her musical work like a sound designer, with layers of audio that unpeel with repeat listens. “It’s going back to that place where I’m like, let me immerse myself in this world. Let me close my eyes, and I’m like, ‘What can I smell? What can I see? What can I feel? What do I hear?’ I always think about everything through the lens of film, so if you were in a film, you would hear the soundtrack playing in the background, but you would still have natural sounds of what you're watching on the screen.”
The yarns she’s spun are fictional, but the sensory experience of Ethel Cain is almost tangible, with immense texture to every track; the warbles of the natural world, the incessant buzzing of cicadas and the wind rustling through the kudzu vines, all become a ghostly choral accompaniment to her tall tales and twangy yearning. “I spend a lot of time outside, and sometimes I have to close my eyes and feel the wind on my skin and hear the cicadas and feel the grass on my toes. I love ASMR too. There's so much more that you can get out of music than just listening to a song”.
I am really fascinated by how the persona and embodiment of Ethel Cain came about. Creating this almost literary and historical character, all this comes through in Preacher’s Daughter. I love reading interviews where Anhedönia is asked about Ethel Cain. It is almost like she has been possessed by this spirit. Vogue spoke with Hayden Silas Anhedönia about Ethel Cain and her upbringing:
“One night in 2018, Hayden Silas Anhedönia found herself possessed by a woman named Ethel Cain. As the story goes – charted chronologically across the singer-songwriter’s debut album Preacher’s Daughter – Cain escapes the strictures of her religious upbringing only to fall into a doomed romance. The listener is then drawn into her downward spiral of kidnapping, drug addiction, prostitution, and eventually Cain’s murder and cannibalisation at the hands of her lover (like any good pop album, then).
The parallels between Anhedönia and her alter ego begin with the former’s upbringing in a tight-knit Southern Baptist community in the Florida panhandle, where she was homeschooled by her father, a deacon. On Preacher’s Daughter, we meet Cain for the first time in 1991, a decade after the death of her own father, the town preacher. From then on, their paths diverge – Anhedönia and her dad are both very much alive, let it be known – but given the heady, horrifying trajectory of her protagonist, where does Cain begin and Anhedönia end? “We inhabit the same space, at least visually, but I’m very different from her,” Anhedönia says, before deadpanning: “I love to laugh, and Ethel’s dead.”
PHOTO CREDIT: Courtesy of Givenchy
Cain might be dead, but her fate – and that of her ancestry – now feels inextricably linked with Anhedönia’s own. Growing up in a deeply religious, conservative family, Anhedönia always felt like an outsider. At 16, she came out to her mother as gay, sending shock waves through their town. She found catharsis for her inner turmoil in Christian choirs and high school theatre programs – “I was always singing as a kid,” she remembers, “I was really annoying” – and began honing her abilities as a musician after decamping to Tallahassee, Florida. There, she experimented with hard drugs and even harder electronic music before experiencing an epiphany of sorts and coming out as trans. She realised that it was time to break away and stake her own place in the world. “I knew then that I wanted to be an artist of some kind,” she says. “I didn’t really care if that was film or music or writing or whatever.”
That’s something Anhedönia is not only aware of but has actively attempted to harness. Her sentimental attachment to the culture of her upbringing is a potent force, even as she gently satirises its motifs of hymns, American flags, and crucifixes. Raised on a diet of Christian music and Gregorian chants – punctuated occasionally by the strains of Lynyrd Skynyrd when it was just her and her father in his car – Anhedönia’s only glimpses of the world outside came through peering between the slats of her grandparents’ staircase as they watched horror movies or true-crime documentaries in the evening.
This breezy blend of the sacred and the profane has come to define both Anhedönia’s music and her razor-sharp eye for fashion. Even over Zoom, she has the air of one of Shirley Jackson’s troubled heroines by way of Sissy Spacek in Badlands, with a touch of Picnic at Hanging Rock’s austere femininity thrown in for good measure. A cross necklace might be paired with a thrash-metal-band tee, or a floaty Gunne Sax dress given a more dangerous edge by the delicate tattoos that line her hairline and hands – including one of her most beloved lyrics, “God loves you, but not enough to save you”.
Before getting to a review for Preacher’s Daughter, The Line of Best Fit interviewed Hayden Silas Anhedönia about Ethel Cain and what is next for that alter ego. It has been a transformative and important year (2022). Coming from a poorer working-class family, life has definitely changed for her. One of the most discussed artists of the moment, Anhedönia has left her Alabama home behind, formed a friendship with her idol, Florence Welch, and is now primed for musical greatness:
“Her designs for Ethel Cain’s story can’t be contained to music alone. Her ambition always expanded far beyond that, with an intention to not only write a series of novels but direct and star in an accompanying movie. She started on a shoestring, but now, with every passing project, she feels that she has the resources to execute her vision to the fullest: “The feeling that I get from drawing this story out into the world in a tangible form such as music, literature or film – it’s a feeling I can’t even describe that I hope everyone in gets to feel at least once in their lives, because it’s what keeps me going. Even though it’s so taxing on my body, soul and spirit, it’s so rewarding that I feel that it’s worth it to be consumed.”
The lore surrounding Ethel Cain rewards a patient listener. Part of the thrill of Preacher’s Daughter its subversive method of storytelling: the way that a particular sound is as transportive as prose. But despite many of its songs stretching towards an indulgent ten minutes to evoke the story’s subtleties, there was too much that Anhedönia felt unsaid. “I’ve actually had to stop reading interpretations because they make me so crazy,” she laughs. “I’ve had to learn to ignore whenever they get the lot wrong. I’m like, ‘Let me put the book out, and then you’ll understand what’s gone on.'"
Her first novel will expand on Cain’s world, and she is our narrator. It begins while she’s in high school: “She’s this formal, very nerdy little girl who has this disturbing mean streak,” Anhedönia explains. “But she’s very proper, raised to be very well-spoken and educated by her mother and grandmother. A good girl. But then she has this interest in the darker things of the world, and she starts getting into trouble when no one is looking. She becomes a rebel but does it in a way that’s very guarded because she has it drilled into her from a young age that she has a reputation to uphold. She’s observant, doesn’t really have a lot of friends… a lonely, kooky little girl growing up in the world. I was very much that way when I was a child.”
The book delves into Ethel’s story, but she is merely the conduit for a larger anthology about intergenerational trauma that made her fate inevitable: a young woman hunted, drugged and cannibalised – a ‘freezer bride’.
But before her second record, Preacher’s Wife, which Anhedönia envisions will take a few years to execute, we can expect a new EP on the horizon. Connected still to the Preacher’s Daughter branch of the story, it serves as a prequel: teenage Ethel falling in love with Willoughby, the man who “House in Nebraska” was written about. It begins with her meeting him and unfolds the events of their relationship before he skips town. The book, she tells me, opens with the events of this EP. “It’s been really sad working on it, you know, writing about a sixteen-year-old girl who has fallen in love with a boy knowing what’s down the line.”
Of the sound, she details: “It’s still very slowcore, because it’s still technically tied to Preacher’s Daughter, but it has a Christian rock edge because it takes place in the late eighties. When I was her age, pining over love and whatnot, I was listening to The Fray and Switchfoot, all of these things. But there’s always going to be a dream pop element, because that’s the core foundation of all my music. It’s gonna be really pretty and really sad; an honest look at the part of her life where she experiences gut-wrenching first love”.
I’ll end up with a positive review from CLASH. They were blown away by a records that they say is filled with revelatory insight and emotion. Preacher’s Daughter is definitely one of the best albums from last year – and Ethel Cain is an artist that is going onto huge things through this year. Everyone needs to hear the unbelievable Preacher’s Daughter:
“A preacher's voice echos out a muffled sermon, before giving way to Ethel Cain’s ethereal and hypnotic murmurs, sounding out like a soft battle cry. Cain (aka Hayden Anhedönia) returns with her debut album ‘Preacher's Daughter’, a sonic journey in which the character of Ethel Cain simultaneously embodies and rejects the role of the archetypal All-American Girl. Following the ‘Inbred’ EP and marking a stark growth of stylistic confidence, the record weaves ideas of trans-generational trauma, cultist Christianity and toxic relationships in a queer matrimony with epic soundscapes, Cain’s prodigious voice repeatedly and ruthlessly demanding the emotional response of the listener.
Permeated with a wave-like ebb and flow, the tracks move through Ethel’s soft laments of lost childhood, to ‘Western Nights’ dark obsessive love, to the cannibalistic climax of ‘Strangers’, her voice circling haunting piano’s, grunge guitars and muddy sound worlds of production in a swarm of energetic chaos.
Clear standouts such as ‘American Teenager’ hold the ferocious energy of youth, epic synths and booming drums drive the powerful hooks as Cain sings with an infectious abandon, painting a picture of the American teen that is tinged with a certain darkness.
Hayden found her voice early in life singing in her church's choir and here it echoes out across ‘A House In Nebraska’ in fittingly angelic melodies, layers of reverb twisting around each other with dizzying clarity.
Influences from Hayden’s life are prevalent thematically and sonically throughout, with her appreciation for Gregorian chants finding a place in ‘Ptolemaea’, a song that structurally falls far from the more classic pop form of ‘American Teenager’ and summons flashes of the Florida landscape with its buzzing flies, gradual chanting build and muddy, doom metal guitars, peaking mid-song with a goosebump conjuring scream. Her love of horror movies is also not lost on the sound with the words “I am no good nor evil, simply I am” spat out by a demon-like voice over rasping strums of guitar.
‘Gibson Girl’ drips with an American-gothic eroticism, with stylistic echoes of Lana Del Rey that instead show the raw truths of a failed American dream rather than bedazzling it with glamour.
Similarly, Cain‘s exploration of religion pushes listeners to confront what is seen as good and pure, stripping back the layers and exposing just how nuanced faith can be. Lyrics such as “And Jesus, if you're there, why do I feel alone in this room with you.” Present a profound loneliness while “Give myself up to him in offering, let him make a woman out of me” arguably marries Christian themes with the re-inventional nature of trans-ness.
Hayden Anhedönia’s own musical journey and her longtime DIY approach to writing, recording and producing her projects reaches a new height with ‘A Preacher’s Daughter’, a truly realised culmination of style and composition.
In this exploration of Ethel Cain’s world, pieces of that world are transformed as she diverts for better or worse from norms of faith, gender and relationships and in turn creates new pathways. A heart-wrenching collection of songs that urges the listener to give themselves over to this album as much as Ethel Cain gives herself over to you.
9/10”.
One of the most essential and phenomenal new artists, Ethel Cain is an incredible songwriter. Her seventy-five-minute debut album is a work of brilliance that marks her out as a future legend! The Florida-born Hayden Silas Anhedönia is simply mesmeric! You can see why so many websites and people are marking Ethel Cain out…
FOR huge success and longevity.
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