Album Review: Ethel Cain, ‘Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You’ – Our Culture

Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You is billed as the prequel to Ethel Cain’s 2022 breakthrough Preacher’s Daughter, a debut album that served as the beginning of a trilogy following three generations of women. Even before it was released, when Hayden Anhedönia was promoting the Inbred EP, she seemed eager to complete and roll it out, overflowing with ambition. Perverts, the 90-minute ambient EP she dropped earlier this year, was such a sonic departure you had to wonder if Ethel Cain’s success had dimmed her interest in advancing the trilogy. If Willoughby Tucker “closes the chapter” on Anhedönia’s alter ego, as she has claimed, it’s an unwaveringly tender and astounding portrait, caught between nostalgia and dreams of violence, tangled yet steadfast in its romantic beliefs. And while she has framed Perverts as a standalone project, it also acts as a musical bridge to the new album, which balances her atmospheric and narrative world-building. Cain can’t help but draw a line from love straight to death, but not without submerging herself in it. 

1. Janie

The story begins in 1986, in the throes of a high school breakup. With little more than wispy guitar and weighty bass, Ethel Cain locks us into a knotty dynamic, teasing a compelling twist: “I know she’s your girl now/ But she was my girl first,” she sings, throwing the listener off guard before revealing that girl is her sister. Hayden Anhedönia sings with an eerie quiver and wide-eyed yearning, often in the same breath, amplifying teenage insecurity. “I can see the end in the beginning of everything/ And in it, you don’t want me.” Fans of Preacher’s Daughter know the end, but of course they want more. 

2. Willoughby’s Theme

A delicate piano theme is swallowed up by a cloud of ominous synths and electric guitar, the spectre of violence. As if his name is unutterable yet stirs up a storm that persists even in the quietest mornings. We know that Ethel Cain’s universe was initially conceptualized with visuals, but such instrumentals are evocative on their own.

3. Fuck Me Eyes 

A character portrait disguised as a pop song is Ethel Cain’s bread and butter, though for as accessible as it sounds, the text here ensures it’s no more sellable than everything around it. (Unless you’re profiting off vibes, not radio play.) The strobing ’80s synths situate us in the right decade, replete with booming drums that betray several spins of Hysteria. The “Miss Holiday Inn” in question (“They all wanna take her out/ But no one ever wants to take her home”) is not the object of desire, nor a mirror for our protagonist, so much as a point of reference for her insecure, self-punishing internal world: “I’ll never blame her/ I kinda hate her/ I’ll never be that kind of angel/ I’ll never be kind enough to me.” The song’s glorified nostalgia, more than just a form of empathy, is that little bit of tenderness for the one stuck down on Earth, aching just as much to feel good.

4. Nettles

‘Nettlles’ may have been the first song Anhedönia wrote in the Alabama house where she finished Preacher’s Daughter, but it’s illuminated by a vision of the future, the fantasies Cain can’t shake. In the context of the album, it is a strikingly liminal introduction to the relationship between her and Tucker; she describes an injury he sustained from an industrial accident, suspending their story between a violently paced upbringing and an imagined, paradisal marriage. Yet its bluegrass arrangement, complete with banjo, fiddle, and pedal steel, is such a stark contrast to the surrounding shimmer and noise that it’s immediately cemented as both the sweetest and realest expression of their love, inextricable as it may be from suffering. Cain’s voice has never sounded as gorgeous, soaring high, as when she sings “This was all for you,” so the image stays firm as the album veers into its second half.

5. Willoughby’s Theme

This instrumental is more in the Grouper zone, with breathy vocals misting over burbles of guitar. Though the track builds in intensity, its most beautiful minutes arrive after the storm dissolves, when the piano starts trickling down, obscured yet starry-eyed. 

6. Dust Bowl

“Ethel Cain lived and died loving and praying to be loved back,” Anhedönia told The Guardian. “The entire Preacher’s trilogy is centred around love. Love lost, love gained, love perverted, love stolen.” Maybe even in that order – after ‘Nettles’, ‘Dust Bowl’ is “love gained.” It’s sublime and trance-like, reminiscing on the pretty boy who took her to slasher flicks at the drive-in and kept his gaze locked on her, even with “all of Alabama laid out in front of your eyes.” The slow-burning track erupts at the end of the line, “Cooking our brains smoking that shit your daddy smoked in Vietnam,” triggering the familial trauma of her own story. Who knows what Cain wouldn’t have been if they hadn’t left this hell for her; still, the beauty in it is undeniable.

7. A Knock at the Door

‘A Knock at the Door’ feels like a secret tucked in the middle of the album, something you’d have to scratch to find. We hear the acoustic guitar up close, squeaking with each slide on the fretboard, and Cain’s voice is nearly unrecognizable in its intimacy. “Everything I’ve loved/ I’ve loved it straight to death/ So I’m still scared of that knock on the door,” she sings, as if unaware it is wide open for everyone to see. Maybe he is, too, if more afraid to show it, but they both would recognize each other in an instant. 

8. Radio Towers

The third instrumental on the album flickers, like that hospital light, as if into another realm, or a leftover from Perverts. But it bleeds right into ‘Tempest’, offering some necessary breathing room before two epics. 

9. Tempest

Cain repeats the phrase “I will always love you” just three times on the record; she wails the word “forever” on the penultimate track for three and a half minutes. Attached to it is not eternal love but pounding shame. “Don’t ask me why I hate myself/ As I’m circling the drain,” she sings earlier, and she doesn’t let you dissect her swirling anxiety and loneliness without experiencing it at gut level. As instrumental layers pile up, including vocals and lap steel by Vyva Melinkolya’s Angel Diaz, we can hear the thoughts possibly passing through her mind as her lover knocks on the door, or after she’s already opened it. She’s convinced she can’t be cured. But she’ll let regret seep deep into her body, until waiting for death seems preferable to forcing it.

10. Waco, Texas

Cain tests the listener’s patience by stretching the closing track towards 15 minutes, but with all the weight it holds – or attempts to shed off – it feels justified. ‘Waco, Texas’ contains some of her most unflinchingly poetic lyrics, and while it presents the story’s conclusion in the form of Tucker’s departure, it keeps going beyond the point of narrative progression. Unlike every other power ballad on Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You, it feels like a huge sigh of relief, somehow, not quite an explosion. “Love is not enough in this world/ But I still believe in Nebraska dreamin’,” she sings, tying things back to ‘A House in Nebraska’. Never enough to match our belief in it, maybe; yet still everything.