Ethel Cain – ‘Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You’ review: a devastating downward spiral, suffused with love

When your debut album ends with the protagonist – and your artistic namesake – murdered and singing from the afterlife, where do you go from there? Since 2022’s ‘Preacher’s Daughter’, expectations have weighed on Hayden Anhedönia to not only follow up her debut as Ethel Cain with a masterpiece, but to satiate the obsessive, popstar-like fandom that’s sprung up around her morbidly spiritual music as well as her personal life. She’s recently apologised for offensive statements and resurfaced social media posts she’d made in the past – provoking discourse that, legitimate criticism aside, has little to do with her artistry now.

In January, Anhedönia released ‘Perverts’, a 90-minute ‘EP’ of skeletal ballads and building-rattling drone that served as a deliberately difficult rejoinder to the casuals and skeptics. Her second official album, ‘Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You’, returns to the Daughters of Cain saga as a prequel that follows the Ethel Cain character as a teenager. It’s the softest of her records, yet perhaps the most emotionally violent. On the opening track ‘Janie’, we can already sense where things are heading: “Please don’t leave me / I’ll always need more / Please leave open your most quiet door.”

‘Fuck Me Eyes’ is the only pop song here, a glittery, doomed karaoke ballad that sounds like ‘Bette Davis Eyes’ via Twin Peaks. It’s the happiest moment on the album, yet it’s about Ethel’s envy of another high school girl who “goes to church straight from the clubs / they say she looks just like her mama before the drugs”.

Until now, most Ethel Cain songs have held a seeming contradiction: major-key melodies atop earthy arrangements, hiding their emotional devastation in plain sight. ‘Nettles’, an eight-minute country ballad, is something else. “We were in a race to grow up / Yesterday, through today, ’til tomorrow / But when the plant blew up / A piece of shrapnel flew and slowed that part of you”, she sings, recalling how deep Ethel’s unconditional love was for Willoughby. It’s the first time Anhedönia has completely allowed tenderness into her music – not in service of tragedy, but in spite of it.

The rest of the album is a train chugging towards purgatory, returning to Anhedönia’s familiar slowcore songwriting. Songs like ‘Dust Bowl’, ‘A Knock at the Door’ and ‘Tempest’ form an unflinching portrait of Ethel’s emotional state: “Don’t ask me why I hate myself / As I’m circling the drain / ’Cause death, it takes too long / And I can’t wait.” Solace comes in the form of three drone interludes, each built around just two chords, evoking the feeling of sunlight on southern landscapes as beautiful and desolate as the people living in them.

On the closing track ‘Waco, Texas’, Ethel accepts a life of nothingness, though she still anticipates the tiniest possibility that Willoughby could ever return to her. It’s a seemingly hopeless conclusion, but the raison d’être of this album isn’t nihilism – it’s the pure, devotional love that Hayden Anhedönia holds for her protagonist, even through her suffering. If this truly is the end of her story, it’s hard to imagine a more heartfelt way to lay Ethel Cain to rest.

Details

• Release date: August 8, 2025
• Record label: Daughters of Cain Records

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