Ethel Cain ‘Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You’ Review: Blissfully Nostalgic Indie Pop

Through the character and pseudonym of Ethel Cain, singer-songwriter Hayden Anhedönia has explored the depths of human trauma and despair, mostly recently on her experimental horrorcore drone EP Perverts. While there’s plenty of struggle and despondence on Cain’s second studio album, Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You—a prequel to 2022’s Preacher’s Daughter—she also tentatively explores something new: bliss.

With its pulsing synths, preponderance of f-bombs, and lyrics that blur the lines between hate and envy, “Fuck Me Eyes” feels like Kim Carnes’s “Bette Davis Eyes” by way of Taylor Swift’s “You Belong with Me.” It stands out among the album’s slow-burning, more heavily atmospheric compositions, but the song—a sweeping six-and-a-half minutes of unsparing observations about a young woman who likes to “show off her ass”—isn’t exactly radio-ready either.

Still, there’s an accessible, Swiftian quality to the album in that it earnestly presents a high school romance with the titular “pretty boy” as basically a matter of life and death. This is, textually, quite justified given that Cain canonically ends up getting murdered and cannibalized by a subsequent lover on Preacher’s Daughter. But even if you don’t know the character’s tragic fate, the sheer heaviness of the music suggests great stakes, reflecting how, when you’re a teenager, every sideways glance, conversation, and stolen kiss seems to carry the entire weight of the world.

Long, steady, deliberate, and full of wide-open sonic spaces, these songs tap heavily into ambient country/western influences and unfurl like hazy, sepia-tinged memories of endless summer afternoons. On tracks like the 15-minute closer “Waco, Texas” and the comparatively succinct opener “Janie,” lethargic, shimmery guitar strumming and Cain’s eerie, yearning vocals are practically all that’s needed to imbue them with a weightiness.

But aside from the bewailing, crushingly heavy “Tempest,” Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You feels more radiant, and more optimistic, than Cain’s previous releases. Augmented with a full complement of bluegrass instrumentation, “Nettles” is as close to celebratory as Cain has ever gotten, as love triumphs over the doom of her violent and tragic premonitions: “‘Cause baby, I’ve never seen brown eyes look so blue/Tell me all the time not to worry/And think of all the time I’ll have with you.”

While “Waco, Texas” is ostensibly a breakup song, and foreshadows Ethel Cain’s grisly death, it feels more bittersweet than tragic. In that sense, Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You is a supremely nostalgic album, representing how even the ugly parts of the past can get rolled into a sense that all was once golden before everything got fucked up.