As a project, Ethel Cain sits on the fence of pop stardom. Sellout tours, playing alongside artists such as boygenius and Caroline Polachek and her anti militarism anthems landing on Obama’s playlists would lead you to believe that a top 40 hit would be next on the agenda. Her 5-minute plus length songs, the intensely dark subject matter, and her January 2025 EP Perverts – 90 minutes of dark ambient and drone, with few vocals in there – would beg to differ.
Separating those sides of your artistry would have been the logical step, especially for an artist having been so heavily ingrained by the SoundCloud music scene, burner accounts, and limited timed releases are commonplace. Separating aliases between your blend of slowcore, folk and shoegaze with pop sensibilities and the dark ambient side of your music would seem to be logical, but the juxtaposition is a tool with a purpose.
The release of Perverts felt like an event – although any time a pop leaning artist teases a drone project would ignite interest – and that hype has carried through to Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You. A shorter project, but one promising to continue along the themes and story of debut Preacher’s Daughter.
Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You was initially teased as a B Sides EP, exploring the character Ethel Cain’s relationship to the titular ex-boyfriend Willoughby Tucker, after Preacher’s Daughter track ‘A House In Nebraska’ left more questions than answers. This project is a prequel. Many bands in the “alternative” space have been experimenting with grander overall concepts (or “lore”, for short), but many times that have been in the (loosely) more progressive side of alternative – the scale of Coheed & Cambria’s world building in particular.
The world built from the first album, of small-town Americana and the South of the 1980s, is grounded in reality. There is no wild fantasy, this world doesn’t shy away from the dark and the gritty, and at the base level, this is about the interpersonal relationships in this setting. Nothing on Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You touches the politics of ‘American Teenager’, but there is enough of a mix of the personal and the every-girl to feel universal outside the small town.
Photo Credit: Photo by Dollie Kyarn
You can hear the tape hiss throughout the record. Feeling like a found footage horror film, like something you’d find perfectly intact in a broken Tacsam tape deck. Opener ‘Janie’ starts the album with an acoustic ballad, and is one of the “cleanest” songs on the project. The one two hit of ‘Fuck Me Eyes’ and ‘Nettles’ on the first half of the album concludes the “Cleanness”
These are the pop songs of the album, even if the scope is much grander than many other pop singles. ‘Fuck Me Eyes’ takes after live set cover track staple ‘Bette Davis Eyes’ with its 80s synths, and ‘Nettles’ calls back to the swung country stomp of debut track ‘Thoroughfare’. Both songs are given time to breathe, and don’t force themselves into the 3-minute pop formula that pop songs tend to mould themselves in.
As much as it starts clean, the mix breaks as the album goes on. Down tuned guitars start to sound like crashing synthesised tsunami waves, the drums go from grooves to sounding closer to being repeated snare bombs from a metalcore song. The instrumentals on the album are longer, and more confident, than the interludes on Preacher’s Daughter – almost certainly a product of the development of Perverts.
‘Waco, Texas’ closes the album after the desolation of ‘Tempest’, the sounds of young love falling apart under the strain of the world. Lush strings build the song, before a soft piano fades in and brings the album’s tension down to a close.
Is Ethel Cain a pop star? If you’ve heard ‘American Teenager’ & ‘Crush’, the answer is yes. If you’ve spent most of this year consumed by the crushing ambience of Perverts, the answer is no. Both sides are on this album, there are sing along moments, and the album builds into some crushing euphoria at the end. Alongside Knocked Loose, there may be few other artists so successful by sticking to their roots. Ethel Cain, as a project, is one of those that is rare in how expansive it is, and how much it touches on so much outside the narrowest definition of the mainstream, while still generating a pop fervour, and Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You is project that will no doubt keep pushing this forward.