Ethel Cain has created some of the most gorgeous music released this year so far. Her vocals are unparalleled, as silky and unblemished as white satin ribbon.
Ethel Cain is nothing if not ambitious. Before coming to music, she wanted to make movies, only to realize that sketching out atmospheric music on four-tracks, iPhones, and DAWs was far more accessible for a poor young trans girl living in the panhandle of Florida. Her music was equally cinematic and ambitious. Stuffed with characters and bristling with poetic imagery, Preacher’s Daughter was the first of a planned triptych following a trio of Southern Gothic matriarchs. Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You is its prequel, following a younger Ethel Cain as she navigates the heavenly highs and infernal lows of a tempestuous love affair. Think of it as the Pearl to Ti West’s X.
Willoughby Tucker begins with “Janie”, throwing you right into the deep end of the drama with its story of platonic abandonment. It’s a searing, siren-like hymn to friendship. Ethel Cain sings, “I know she’s your girl now / But she was my girl first” in heartbreaking, heartbroken soprano. The narrative is immediately subsumed by “Willoughby’s Theme”. However, an introspective piano ballad, somewhere between Erik Satie and Nine Inch Nails, is played out at a molasses pace until a ghost sun of atmospheric noise guitar bursts through the gloom—not dispelling the hopelessness, just letting you see it more clearly.
The oppressiveness pauses “Fuck Me Eyes”, the album’s obligatory pop single. It’s a bold, opiated synthpop ballad about a loose woman in Willoughby’s orbit with some memorable lyrics and irresistible builds. It’s a bit of a tangent, but it also spares the record from becoming overwhelmingly bleak.
Synthetic pop takes a hairpin turn into even more unexpected Americana territory on “Nettles”, which could sound at home on an Allison Krauss or Emmylou Harris album, with its cane sugar fiddles and ghostly pedal steel guitar. Please note that’s four genres in four songs, each rendered masterfully, with distinctive and striking lyrics belying a literary imagination and worldview, all delivered with a voice as clear as colored glass. That, alone, qualifies Ethel Cain as one of the most interesting, ambitious, audacious talents working in any genre at the moment, or in this case, all of them.
Americana is just as quickly swallowed up by the second instrumental, “Willoughby’s Interlude”, with its slow-motion left-hand piano and ethereal drones passing like a cloud in front of the sun. Even the bright times have super dark times on an Ethel Cain record. “Dust Bowl” intersperses a middle school crush with slasher flicks and “an eighth-grade death pact”. She watches her childhood best friend die, foaming at the mouth, on “A Knock at the Door”. “Tempest” is full of self-harm and emotional numbness. She’s praying for death by the time “Waco, Texas” plays the album out, crawling between twin radio towers with burning red neon eyes towards extinction.
Make no mistake, Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You is a dark, heavy listen. It continues in the vein of Perverts from earlier this year, amping up the ambient and drone elements and making the slowcore aspects even more austere and uncompromising. It’s also some of the most gorgeous music released this year so far. Cain’s vocals are unparalleled, as silky and unblemished as white satin ribbon. The guitars are immaculate, burning through the murk like white phosphorus work lights, leaving you seeing spots and stars. It’s another ambitious entry in an increasingly flawless discography. Hopefully, we won’t have to wait too long for Preacher’s Daughter Part III!