Ethel Cain’s Anti-Pop Stardom | The New Yorker

Halfway via the music video for “American Teenager,” a feel-good pop track that has been streamed greater than 100 million occasions, the digicam cuts, for an instantaneous, to 2 youngsters sitting in entrance of a tv, watching reside footage of the Twin Towers falling. The monitor itself, which the twenty-seven-year-old musician Hayden Anhedönia has carried out at Coachella and in dozens of arenas around the globe, conceals an analogous darkness; fluttering harmonies and a dancey drumbeat sweeten a sure-handed critique of U.S. army agitprop. “The neighbor’s brother got here house in a field / However he wished to go, so perhaps it was his fault,” Anhedönia sings. “One other pink coronary heart taken by the American dream.” Barack Obama added it to his annual favorites playlist in 2022. Anhedönia, nevertheless, had little curiosity in being the nation’s subsequent down-home sweetheart. “I don’t need to be a celeb,” she informed the Occasions, that very same 12 months.Consideration discovered her anyway. Throughout the pandemic, prairie aesthetics—gingham attire, dried wildflowers, fishtail braids—took maintain amongst younger individuals on-line: a development quaintly named cottagecore. Anhedönia’s promotional artwork featured tattered American flags, wooden panelling, white lace, and church spires; her Southern-gothic alter ego, Ethel Cain, turned the motion’s unlikely face. However, in distinction to some adherents who gave the impression to be channelling nostalgia for a bygone period, her relationship to the fashion was difficult—half satire, half reckoning together with her evangelical upbringing.Anhedönia’s début LP, “Preacher’s Daughter,” from 2022, is a thirteen-track idea album in regards to the abduction of the teen-age Ethel—a roots-rock opera for followers of Flannery O’Connor. The story begins in 1991, after Ethel’s sadistic father dies and her boyfriend, Willoughby, leaves her. She runs away from house and hitches a trip with an older man who sells her into prostitution, finally killing and cannibalizing her. The songs, which mix a languid, Lana Del Rey-esque pastiche of Southern femininity with the droning atmospherics of nineties slowcore, slyly transmit Anhedönia’s ideologies. The file’s riveting narrative and political conscience stood out in an age of generic radio fare and overcautious stars. It was a runaway hit.This week, Anhedönia launched “Willoughby Tucker, I’ll At all times Love You,” a form of prequel to her début. She writes, produces, and engineers nearly all of her music; on the brand new album, she contributes percussion, banjo, synth, piano, bass, and no less than three totally different sorts of guitar. This time, the story hinges on the heartbreak that put Ethel on the highway to her ugly destiny. Willoughby’s father, a traumatized Vietnam vet, abuses him—on one monitor, Ethel calls her boyfriend a “pure blood-stained blond”—and the younger lovers fantasize about escape. However the imagined completely satisfied ending is fleeting. Anhedönia quickly lays out their doomed futures: Willoughby will likely be deployed to combat in a conflict, and Ethel, in fact, will likely be kidnapped.Not all of those particulars are divulged within the lyrics. A lot of Anhedönia’s world-building is communicated via extratextual supplies: weblog posts, illustrations, Q. & A.s, and passages from a novel she has been engaged on, which her followers have studiously collated. The fictional universe of those data additionally rhymes with the circumstances of Anhedönia’s youth. Her father, like Ethel’s, was a priest; she, too, was raised in a small, conservative city, with family members who served within the army. Anhedönia’s earliest publicity to modern tradition got here within the type of the true-crime serials her grandmother liked, which kindled her personal curiosity within the macabre. A lot of her inventive training occurred in church, the place she sang within the choir and practiced classical piano. Her coming-out was met with predictable hostility. At eighteen, she left her mother and father’ home, and commenced making music—particularly Gregorian chants and nightmarish digital items, produced on GarageBand and impressed by the goth golf equipment the place she’d been experimenting with narcotics.Anhedönia has defied the tenets of mainstream pop stardom ever since, each in her musical output and in her outspoken politics. Following the homicide of the UnitedHealthcare government Brian Thompson, she shared a narrative on Instagram captioned “#KillMoreCEOs”; Fox Information denounced the assertion as incitement to terrorism. Final February, after Israel killed greater than 100 Palestinians in a sequence of air strikes on Rafah, Anhedönia posted that “the USA authorities is complicit in a genocide” and launched a track known as “من النهر”—Arabic for “from the river.” Such gestures have solely endeared her to her hard-core leftist fan base. A couple of months in the past, when “Preacher’s Daughter” was belatedly launched on vinyl, it débuted at No. 10 on the Billboard Sizzling 200—the primary such achievement for a transgender artist.However she doesn’t appear to be in a rush to interrupt into the charts once more. In January, she launched “Perverts,” an hour-and-a-half-long noise mission which incorporates such doom-metal nocturnes as “Onanist” and “Housofpsychoticwomn.” (Writhing with distortion, “Blair Witch Mission”-style Foley, and breathy ululations, the tracks are literally amongst my favorites of hers.) “Cult Star Units Out to Lose Buddies and Alienate Folks,” a Guardian headline learn. Anhedönia shared a screenshot of the evaluate on Instagram, with apparent amusement.“Willoughby Tucker, I’ll At all times Love You” isn’t a straightforward hear, both. It lacks the dynamic vary of Anhedönia’s début; its ten tracks, practically half of that are strictly instrumental, typically blur collectively. The pacing is gradual, the instrumentation typically impenetrable, and the characters circle endlessly across the similar ideas. (On one anaphoric bridge, Ethel moans twelve consecutive occasions that she will be able to’t anticipate her personal demise.) If, in her earlier songwriting, Anhedönia disguised her polemicizing in upbeat pop, right here she submerges it through a type of hypnotism. Anhedönia has described worship music as brainwashing; given “Willoughby Tucker” ’s repetitions and melodrama, she appears to have borrowed its techniques.Nonetheless, the voice of Ethel, who has but to be floor down by the traumas that finally flip her into a logo of feminine victimhood, has by no means been clearer. On “Fuck Me Eyes,” an eighties synth-heavy single, she describes one other lady from her highschool, alternately slut-shaming her—“She actually will get round city in her previous Cadillac / In her mother’s denims that she reduce to essentially showcase her ass”—and sympathizing together with her. The tone is a little bit merciless and a little bit admiring, a nuanced sketch of the teen-age thoughts and its contradictions.And later, “Nettles,” a woozy nation elegy for Willoughby, who’s making ready for deployment, remembers the tough truths of “American Teenager”:That image on the wall you’re fearful of seems to be similar to youI need to bleed, I need to harm the way in which that boys doMaybe you’re proper and we should always cease watching the information.Even because it lulls, the album immerses. “Nettles” presages “Radio Towers,” on which we hear the insistent beeping of what can moderately be assumed to be Willoughby’s heart-rate monitor. For 5 uninterrupted minutes, the monitor sustains and modulates the identical chord time and again, conveying the agony of ready for a liked one’s prognosis.Anhedönia’s staunch refusal of the highlight might take her into richer and stranger terrain. The discharge of “Willoughby Tucker” concludes her file cope with Dr. Luke’s Prescription Songs, which has labored with such artists as Dua Lipa and Miley Cyrus; for her subsequent album, Anhedönia plans to go unbiased. Overwhelmed by impatient and entitled followers and by the histrionics of right-wing media, she’s additionally deleted her social-media accounts. “I’m wanting ahead to being totally answerable for my the whole lot,” she mentioned final week, on a podcast. “I need to depart behind a protracted legacy of artwork that was real and heartfelt—not for anyone else.” ♦