ETHEL CAIN - Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You

Ethel Cain's approach to music is a blend of deep transparency and gloomy chromatics, as if, in painting her self-portrait, the Florida singer-songwriter had applied a layer of clear varnish to make her picture — and the darkness of the colors that make it up — all the more accurate and believable. Ethel Cain's third album, arriving just seven months after "Perverts", is narratively a prequel to the 2022 concept album "Preacher's Daughter", which told without filters the story of a protagonist clouded by issues of faith, addiction and toxic relationships, culminating in the tragic finale in which Ethel Cain was literally devoured by her boyfriend.

If the story already seemed over, given an ending that left little room for interpretation and even less for further narrative developments, Ethel Cain decides to dig even deeper into her tale by going back to the past, giving us an entire album announced in June by the single "Nettles". The track grows slowly across its 8 minutes, unhurried, as if it could go on forever; banjo, violins and guitar fit impeccably around Ethel Cain's vocals, which playfully chase one another. The arrival of the drums at nearly the halfway point seems to gradually push all the other instruments aside, leaving center stage to the voice, which then doubles harmonically, bringing back the main melody in an instrumental climax. "Nettles" manages to capture you both musically and emotionally: it's a dark, raw country-folk track that nonetheless cradles you right to the end, never letting its long, unusual length be felt.

The 4/4 of the second single, "Fuck Me Eyes", instead takes us somewhere else entirely: the melancholic 80s synths and filtered drums recall dream-pop atmospheres that unfold into fascinating, dreamy instrumentals. With the monolithic sound of "Willoughby's Theme", though, we start to become familiar with some of this record's main influences. The post-rock atmospheres reminiscent of Godspeed You! Black Emperor and the almost hypnotic repetition of the piano instrumental theme are wrapped in a haze of melancholy, with chords as heavy as slow stab wounds. The main melody of "Willoughby's Theme" returns a few tracks later in "Willoughby's Interlude", which opens and unfolds into a lasting, almost ambient ethereal-wave wall of sound that doesn't aim to show off grandeur but, in its calm, conveys weight and stillness. The ending seems to want to build a new theme, and the guitar that arrives after six minutes of ethereal instrumental evolutions sounds tangible, as if it were being played right next to us, slowly pulling us in.

Slowcore (which from here on will remain a steady presence through to the end of the album) is introduced in "Dust Bowl", which moves through deep basslines and Ethel Cain's melancholic voice, closing with celestial guitars that resemble voices slowly having their breath knocked out of them. And while "A Knock At The Door" continues down this slowcore path, "Radio Towers" returns to the ambient sounds and languid pacing of "Willoughby's Theme" and "Willoughby's Interlude", in a track that feels motionless, as still as if, while it plays, time itself stopped flowing for five minutes and twelve seconds. The piano chords recall ocean waves that, instead of crashing against the rocks, spread out slowly across the sand.

The two closing tracks further underline this hypnotic, sedative feel: “Tempest” keeps building in strength, and when the drums kick in it recalls the Have A Nice Life of “Deathconciousness“, while the vocals grow ever more reverberated, spiritual, almost blurred, and the final climax isn't loud but dense, with no small amount of emotional power.

The combined 25 minutes of the two closing songs bring the album to a fitting conclusion. “Willoughby Tucker, I'll Always Love You” is a fitting continuation of “Preacher's Daughter”, both thematically and musically: the post-rock and slowcore experimentation sits in friendly partnership with catchy, melodically resolving motifs that, while consistent with the record's context, can at times feel overly repetitive and a bit hard-going. Even the odder, less immediate structures, though, are propped up by the reflective, at times transcendental walls of sound that accompany the listener on an endless search for self, and that give us hope for Ethel Cain's continued artistic growth — an artist who, in the meantime, is enjoying some unintended publicity thanks to a social-media spat with Lana Del Rey. The singer behind “Born To Die“ posted a snippet on Instagram of a new track that includes the line: “Ethel Cain ha odiato il mio post su Instagram/ Pensa sia carino ricreare la mia posa di Chicago”. The tension between the two singers appears to stem from the fact that Cain is now dating Del Rey's ex, Jack Donoghue of Salem. In 2022, both had posted photos with Donoghue: Del Rey's in front of a prison in Chicago, Cain's outdoors — a detail that seems to have inspired the line about “recreating my Chicago pose”.

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18/08/2025