Album of the Week: Ethel Cain – Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You
It’s 2025, and pop music has changed. You might think, “Yes, but hasn’t it always been changing?” Of course, but the past few years have seen a shift that feels different, largely driven by streaming’s dominance as the primary way people discover and consume music. The album as a single, cohesive work, best experienced in one sitting, still exists, but its cultural function has evolved.
Streaming has dismantled many of the boundaries that once dictated listening habits. Genre lines, subcultural rules, and niche loyalties now blur with a swipe. One minute you’re in hyperpop territory, the next you’re deep in folk balladry. The definition of a hit has also changed. Where labels once selected singles, with big-budget videos to push them into public consciousness, today’s hits can emerge organically, powered by listener behaviours and trends. A replay button and a viral TikTok clip can propel an album’s deep cut into ubiquity.
The tools of music-making have also shifted. Gone is the necessity of costly studio sessions, hired producers, or session musicians. With a laptop, a bedroom, and a vision, an artist can craft a fully realised work. This democratisation of both listening and creation has opened spaces for many singular voices to thrive, like Ethel Cain.
This week, Ethel Cain, the musical moniker of Florida-born Hayden Anhedönia, releases her second studio album, Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You. A thematic prequel to 2022’s breakthrough Preacher’s Daughter, it once again follows the Ethel Cain character through a deeply cinematic, often unsettling vision of small-town America in the Bible Belt, a landscape steeped in pain, longing, and the dream of escape. Stylistically, Cain can be likened to the Southern Gothic fiction of Flannery O’Connor and the later works of Cormac McCarthy and Gillian Flynn. But go back further and you might find echoes of the Brontë sisters in her dark romanticism and recurring themes of isolation and escape.
Cain’s music may be quickly categorised as pop, but with the release of this latest record, that label feels increasingly insufficient, and pretty much incorrect. Between Willoughby Tucker and Preacher’s Daughter, Cain released the digital-only album Perverts (2025), which plunged listeners into the void-like realms of dark ambient and drone. On Willoughby Tucker, her productions are intricate and expansive, drawing more heavily from ambient, drone, post-rock, slowcore, and country, as well as traditional pop forms.
At its most immediately accessible, the noir balladry of Lana Del Rey shadows tracks like Nettles, a lyrically vivid, sonically panoramic piece of ambient Americana, and Janie, which utilises the stripped textures of slowcore indie-rock. Yet these immediate cuts sit alongside weightier, more abstract works. The glacial instrumentals Willoughby’s Theme and Willoughby’s Interlude drift in patient, post-rock ambience, while F**k Me Eyes, in the lineage of Preacher’s Daughter’s American Teenager, offers the album’s most direct pop moment with a shimmering blend of synth-pop and dream-pop whose layered vocals recall the poppier side of the Cocteau Twins.
Other standouts include the plaintive slow-burn of Dust Bowl and the haunting melancholy of A Knock at the Door, which begins with bare acoustic guitar and eerie synths before mutating into a spectral coda reminiscent of ’90s ambient pioneers Labradford and Stars of the Lid. The same can be heard in the desolate sprawl of Radio Towers, a patient, foreboding piece of pure atmosphere that plunges the album into shadow.
By the time Radio Towers fades, the record has nearly reached the hour mark, yet Cain isn’t quite finished. The final two tracks, Tempest and Waco, Texas, account for the closing 25 minutes, pushing Willoughby Tucker… into truly epic territory. Tempest unleashes a crushing wall of doom-metal sludge, its tidal guitars swallowing distant, layered wails of desperation. It is overwhelming but also cathartic, a sonic storm before the final calm of Waco, Texas. Here, the Willoughby Tucker story comes to a crushing close in 1993, where the characters of Ethel and Willoughby are interspersed, or perhaps mirrored, in the Waco tragedy, as the intense intimacy of the star-crossed lovers collides with the confines of reality.
