Ethel Cain

Pennsylvania's singer-songwriter Hayden Anhedonia, raised in Florida, recorded two albums creadited to White Silas: Colossus (2017) and Arcane Vessels (2018).

Renamed Ethel Cain, she released the EPs Golden Age (2019) and Inbred (2021), in a Lingua Ignota-lite vein (notably in Inbred), before the ambitious album Preacher’s Daughter (2022), a 75-minute gothic rock opera set in the deep south of the USA and ostensibly "centered around the character Ethel Cain, who runs away from home only to meet a gruesome end at the hands of a cannibalistic psychopath". It's 75 minutes of sinister, stately, crawling, quasi-slowcore elegies inspired by church music, and of Southern gothic tales with religious overtones. The eight-minute A House in Nebraska is paradigmatic: implacable sedate waves of fatalistic angst-filled crooning over dense and martial piano-driven orchestration. Meanwhile, the gloomy and lithurgical Family Tree Intro has set the tone for the whole album. In the first part there is actually a bit of variety, but it requires deep listening: the seven-minute Family Tree, a display of her vocal range over bluesy guitar jamming, the radio-friendly Taylor Swift-esque American Teenager (with echoes of Journey’s Don’t Stop Believin), and the fragile waltzing country ballad Hard Times, perhaps the most Mazzy Star-esque moment. The nine-minute psychodrama Thoroughfare, which begins like a somnolent remix of Florence and the Machine's Dog Days Are Over and soars into a vibrant hymn before decaying into free-form wordless agony, splits the album in two. Gibson Girl descends into a cold and dark atmosphere over a subdued hip-hop beat and an almost Pink Floyd-ian guitar solo. Next, in rapid sequence, come the lugubrious and mostly instrumental Ptolemaea (again, echoes of Animals-ra Pink Floyd), the wordless, horror, Grouper-esque mantra August Underground, and the piano sonata Televangelism, signaling the protagonist's transition to heaven. The narration (from the otherworld) resumes in the seven-minute Sun Bleached Flies, which also marks a return to dense and martial orchestrations, which could be on a Kate Bush album, while the closing chapter of Strangers swings between grandiose apotheosis and the simpler style of American Teenager. At best, her austere and floating vocals are as impactful as the Gregorian chants that inspired her. At worst, the music repeats itself without adequately accenting the narrative. Either way she pioneers a new kind of rock opera, of fictional storytelling with the limited instruments of popular music, and at the same time revived the character of the erudite singer-songwriter.

Meanwhile, she released a few singles under the moniker Tommy: New Mexico Dreaming (2021), Rangerover (2023) and For Matt (2024). And many singles as Ashmedai between 2021 and 2025.

Ethel Cain then released the 89-minute album Perverts (2025), oddly marketed as an EP, of droning music. The bulk is constituted by lengthy catathonic slo-core elegies like the eight-minute Vacillator , the sweetest and most skeletal of the bunch. The 11-minute Amber Waves, wrapped in otherworldy reverbs, is emblematic of this fragile and vulnerable muisc (plus a four-minute instrumental coda, first distorted guitar riffs and electronic noise that evoke a haunting fog and then an acoustic guitar that evokes a poetic sunset). The nine-minute instrumental Etienne indulges in a bedroom folk theme for acoustic guitar that feels like a slow-motion John Fahey fantasia. The 12-minute Perverts descends into full-fledged droning music but still from a neurotic angle. The droning experience peaks with the transcendental 15-minute Pulldrone, reminiscent of LaMonte Young's "Dream House". On the harder side of the album, Onanist is a dialog between dreamy vocals and demonic noise. The seven-minute Thatorchia is an alien vibration mixed with agonizing laments from hell. The piano ballad Punish goes up in a flame of guitar distortions. The project is intriguing but bloated and often amateurish. The 13-minute Housofpsychoticwomn suffers from both weaknesses: a warped gloomy rumble of praying monks that becomes a chaotic vortex, but a far fry from professional musique concrete.

Willoughby Tucker, I'll Always Love You (Daughters of Cain, 2025) is another rock opera, a prequel to Preacher’s Daughter. The austere production makes it sound like it was recorded inside a cathedral. Her intimate songwriting is a concentrate of grief. The album is front-loaded with the lighter moments. The charming pensive Janie sits halfway between Joni Mitchell and Bjork. The poppy and synth-heavy Fuck Me Eyes leans towards Bjork. The instrumental interludes are also relatively domesticated: the new-agey Willoughby's Theme, the symphonic gothic Willoughby's Interlude and the aquatic ambient music of Radio Towers. But the rest is far more depressing, starting with the lethargic and tender dirge Dust Bowl, and the sad and moving country love song Nettles, eight minutes halfway between Crosby Stills & Nash and Don McLean's American Pie. The funereal suspense of theten-minute Tempest induces a harrowing hypnosis when the drumming turns grandiose and the echo follows her vocals delayed by a few seconds, which then explodes in guitar distortion and astral mantra-like incantations. The 15-minute Waco, Texas is another devastating long-form stream of consciousness, another slow crescendo that after 12 minutes transforms into cosmic chanting. Not always works, but the intensity is undeniable.