Folks have been talking about the dissolution of the album format for years now, as streaming culls out singles and embeds them in appropriately themed playlists. The experience of listening to an LP in order has become kind of a novelty for some – the cohesion of each song bleeding into the next has been scrapped, the intended story deferred. Ethel Cain (a.k.a. Hayden Anhedönia) doesn’t make music for playlists — as evidenced, once more, by her sophomore LP, Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You.
Like a sweet-voiced Stephen King, Anhedönia pens epics that unfold against pastoral scenes of God’s Country where people try and fail to lacquer over the innate horrors of living. In many ways, she’s almost more performance artist than musician, composing her 2021 EP, Inbred, in the basement of an old Indiana church, and conjuring the Southern Gothic saga of the fictional Ethel Cain, a character Anhedönia created for 2022’s Preacher’s Daughter. That album — which mingled Lana Del Rey moodiness with dashes of the club — followed Cain as she fled an abusive father, only to end up murdered and cannibalized.
Anhedönia says Willoughby is a prequel to Preacher’s Daughter, telling the tale of Cain’s first love. Like Anhedönia’s previous releases, the record feels like a haunting — like you’re trapped in a decaying house, listening to a ghost that will only rest when its story is finally told. (You can see, then, where we were going with the anti-playlist thing above). Yes, there’s the single “Fuck Me Eyes” — the liltingly bitter ode to the popular girl who the town paints a slut — but in essence, the record is more a wash of words and sweet sounds than a collection of singular songs. And what gorgeous words those are: “pretty boy/Natural blood-stained blond,” (“Dust Bowl”), “my honey’s heart is blue and a second offbeat” (“Waco, Texas”), “hold me, smell of mildew I wanna die in this room” (“Janie”).
It’s easy to get lost in the haze — to wander down the echoing corridors of lyrics and synths and strings. Still, Willoughby lacks the dynamism of its predecessor, the ecstatic neon highs and chilly basement lows. That makes sense, of course, in that this is the story of a first love, a small town, quieter horrors. Seen as a whole, though, that quietness can sometimes verge on monotony, songs running into the next with little to grab onto — like an evaporating phantom.
