Ethel Cain - Willougby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You Review

Ethel Cain dials down the horror in favour of moody, sprawling soundscapes of longing and heartbreak.

How do you follow-up a critically acclaimed alt-pop album which spawned a radio-baiting crossover hit?  Hayden Anhedönia’s pointed answer was the nightmarish ambient and drone experiments of this January’s ‘Perverts’ EP. And after that? On new studio albumWilloughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You, the Florida-born artist splits the difference, without compromising her beguilingly dark vision.

In the wider mythology of the Ethel Cain character, this record is a prequel to the overarching saga of 2022’s Preacher’s Daughter LP, which detailed a litany of abuse and misfortune throughout Ethel’s life up to (and beyond) her grisly death. Willougby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You has a narrower focus on a comparatively calm period of Ethel’s adolescence, and her intense romantic relationship with the eponymous Willoughby. It supposedly closes the door on the story of Ethel Cain, a creative persona which Anhedönia will now retire.

There is beauty and warmth on this record, but a distinctly downbeat kind. Sparkly 80s synths and jangly banjos invite the listener in, but the lyrics zero in on the more painful parts of young love, whether that’s jealousy (‘Fuck Me Eyes’), separation anxiety (‘Nettles’) or loneliness (‘Janie’).

Moments of affirmation are always tempered with a sense of melancholy; they’re never allowed to soar too freely. The tracks creep along at a languorous pace, and there’s restraint to the way Anhedönia occasionally switches up her deep, murmuring register to gorgeous harmonising. As an artist, it’s clear that Ethel Cain prefers to linger in the shadows than bask in the sun.

The more conventionally structured and melodic tracks on the first half of the record are broken up by atmospheric instrumentals which stifle any truly pop sensibility from emerging. Instead they add a spaciousness and invoke the passage of time, suggesting this is a narrative made up of dispersed fragments, a jumbled recollection with gaps where only feeling remains. 

Willougby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You adopts the slowcore arrangement and layered, gauzy vocals of musicians like Midwife and Vyva Melinkolya, with the latter providing backing instrumentation on more filled-out tracks like ‘The Tempest’. Clocking in at 75 minutes, the record has time in spades yet deploys repetition sparingly. Aside from the infectious country pop of ‘Fuck Me Eyes’, Anhedönia opts for subtle, evolving refrains over big hooks. It’s a shy, self-effacing collection of songs, which slowly reveals the tenderness beneath its dour exterior.

Standout ‘Dust Bowl’ finds the narrator at her most besotted, extolling devotion to a ‘pretty boy, scared of the rain, my God, tend the row of your pretty violets’. This sensitive portrait is a sharp contrast to the monstrous men which often populate Cain’s universe. The songwriting retains an affinity for the macabre but this time the violence is a step removed, in the well-worn trope of horny teenagers at a movie theatre: ‘Drive-in, slasher flick again, feeling me up as a porn star dies’. The sparse arrangement explodes into rapturous guitars which swirl around Anhedönia’s lilting vocal. It's stirringly romantic, like a soundtrack to the couple’s first dance at a particularly gloomy wedding.

On ‘A Knock At The Door’, Anhedönia’s voice is reminiscent of fellow Southern Gothic conjurer Nicole Dollanganger. Higher-pitched vocals betray an innocence and smallness at odds with the unravelling expansiveness of the track, like a child lost in a cave. Anhedönia works again on this record with producer Matthew Tomasi, whose portentous reverb-laden guitar similarly stoked the flames on Dollanganger’s 2015 record ‘Natural Born Losers’. 

The contemplative ambient piece ‘Radio Towers’ bleeds into the dirge-like dramatics of ‘The Tempest’. The lyrics bitterly mourn the demise of a relationship amid a desolate atmosphere; the echoing drums here sound as if played in a cavernous underground chamber. This spellbinding track is the record’s sonic and emotional crescendo, breaking into a dense wall of sound as Anhedönia bellows the word ‘forever’, again and again into infinity, more elemental force than small-town American misfit.

The gently meandering 15 minutes of ‘Waco Texas’ which follows is a moving but slightly overextended epilogue. Between ‘American Teenager’ and this point, Anhedönia has proven herself too dynamic a musician to rely on anthemic singalongs. Still, this closing track would have left a more lasting impression by settling into the kind of understated melodic refrain deployed elsewhere on the record.

Nonetheless, Willougby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You is a masterclass in emotion, mood and a distinctly literary kind of storytelling. Ethel Cain bows out with the feel-bad album of the summer.