Florida-born multimedia artist Ethel Cain returns with her sophomore album Willoughby Tucker, I'll Always Love You. A prequel to the critically acclaimed Preacher's Daughter, the new album recounts the story of Ethel's first love, Willoughby Tucker, and their humid, laden romance. Hayden Anhedonia, the creative force behind the entire Ethel Cain project, has spent the past several years assembling the album in her home studios from Coraopolis, PA to Tallahassee, FL, all the while selling out tours and playing festivals worldwide, cementing herself as a singular artistic voice on the rise.

Album of The Week - Staff Review

Its 2025, and pop music has changed. You might think, Yes, but hasnt it always been changing? Of course, but the past few years have seen a shift that feels different, largely driven by streamings dominance as the primary way people discover and consume music. The album as a single, cohesive work, best experienced in one sitting, still exists, but its cultural function has evolved.

Streaming has dismantled many of the boundaries that once dictated listening habits. Genre lines, subcultural rules, and niche loyalties now blur with a swipe. One minute youre in hyperpop territory, the next youre deep in folk balladry. The definition of a hit has also changed. Where labels once selected singles, with big-budget videos to push them into public consciousness, todays hits can emerge organically, powered by listener behaviours and trends. A replay button and a viral TikTok clip can propel an albums deep cut into ubiquity.

The tools of music-making have also shifted. Gone is the necessity of costly studio sessions, hired producers, or session musicians. With a laptop, a bedroom, and a vision, an artist can craft a fully realised work. This democratisation of both listening and creation has opened spaces for many singular voices to thrive, like Ethel Cain.

This week, Ethel Cain, the musical moniker of Florida-born Hayden Anhednia, releases her second studio album, Willoughby Tucker, Ill Always Love You. A thematic prequel to 2022s breakthrough Preachers Daughter, it once again follows the Ethel Cain character through a deeply cinematic, often unsettling vision of small-town America in the Bible Belt, a landscape steeped in pain, longing, and the dream of escape. Stylistically, Cain can be likened to the Southern Gothic fiction of Flannery OConnor and the later works of Cormac McCarthy and Gillian Flynn. But go back further and you might find echoes of the Bront sisters in her dark romanticism and recurring themes of isolation and escape.

Cains music may be quickly categorised as pop, but with the release of this latest record, that label feels increasingly insufficient, and pretty much incorrect. Between Willoughby Tucker and Preachers Daughter, Cain released the digital-only album Perverts (2025), which plunged listeners into the void-like realms of dark ambient and drone. On Willoughby Tucker, her productions are intricate and expansive, drawing more heavily from ambient, drone, post-rock, slowcore, and country, as well as traditional pop forms.

At its most immediately accessible, the noir balladry of Lana Del Rey shadows tracks like Nettles, a lyrically vivid, sonically panoramic piece of ambient Americana, and Janie, which utilises the stripped textures of slowcore indie-rock. Yet these immediate cuts sit alongside weightier, more abstract works. The glacial instrumentals Willoughbys Theme and Willoughbys Interlude drift in patient, post-rock ambience, while F**k Me Eyes, in the lineage of Preachers Daughters American Teenager, offers the albums most direct pop moment with a shimmering blend of synth-pop and dream-pop whose layered vocals recall the poppier side of the Cocteau Twins.

Other standouts include the plaintive slow-burn of Dust Bowl and the haunting melancholy of A Knock at the Door, which begins with bare acoustic guitar and eerie synths before mutating into a spectral coda reminiscent of 90s ambient pioneers Labradford and Stars of the Lid. The same can be heard in the desolate sprawl of Radio Towers, a patient, foreboding piece of pure atmosphere that plunges the album into shadow.

By the time Radio Towers fades, the record has nearly reached the hour mark, yet Cain isnt quite finished. The final two tracks, Tempest and Waco, Texas, account for the closing 25 minutes, pushing Willoughby Tucker into truly epic territory. Tempest unleashes a crushing wall of doom-metal sludge, its tidal guitars swallowing distant, layered wails of desperation. It is overwhelming but also cathartic, a sonic storm before the final calm of Waco, Texas. Here, the Willoughby Tucker story comes to a crushing close in 1993, where the characters of Ethel and Willoughby are interspersed, or perhaps mirrored, in the Waco tragedy, as the intense intimacy of the star-crossed lovers collides with the confines of reality.