Ethel Cain is not your average pop star.
As the Southern Gothic persona of the singer and songwriter Hayden Anhedönia, Cain became one of music’s least likely cult sensations in recent years, not with quick hits but via deep storytelling lore and epic slowcore ballads.
While “Preacher’s Daughter,” her first album from 2022, also featured some perky pop-rock, like the anthemic “American Teenager,” it preferred to linger in darker sounds and moods, exploring small-town religious trauma, sexual violence and even cannibalism.
Cain, 27, built intrigue along the way with a blunt, irreverent internet presence, and went on to open tour dates for Florence + the Machine and boygenius. She largely avoided the industry strongholds of New York and Los Angeles, preferring to create alone in remote isolation: rural Alabama, desolate Indiana, frigid western Pennsylvania.
After her breakout success, Cain swerved even harder, following up her celebrated debut with “Perverts,” a nearly 90-minute album of ambient drone music released in January.
On Aug. 8, she will return to song structure, if not pure pop, with “Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You,” a dense and lush album that alternates between peppy synths, detuned acoustic ballads and eerie instrumental passages, with songs clocking in at eight, 10 and 15 minutes long.
Ahead of the release, Cain joined Popcast, The New York Times’s music show, to discuss what happens when a bedroom fantasy becomes your career; how the characters she created both shield her and don’t; and what it means to be a prominent trans artist in this social and political moment.
Cain also spoke at length for the first time about the resurfacing of old social-media screenshots revealing her past racial insensitivities, alongside what she called a “massive smear campaign” that targeted her identity. (Cain released a 2,000-word statement earlier this month that can be read here.)
These are edited excerpts from the conversation.
JOE COSCARELLI I thought we could start by talking about the difference between Hayden and Ethel Cain, and how you think about that character now, a few years into this project.
ETHEL CAIN When you’re from the South, people are very nosy. When I started making this project, it was a way to talk about the things that I’ve been through — my experiences in life, the experiences of people that I love, everything that I have witnessed — in a way where I could be open and honest about the nasty, the brutal, the ugly, without doing it in a way where everyone in my life is going to call me and be like, “Why are you talking about this?” It was kind of a way for me to shirk off responsibility: “All names and places have been fictionalized to protect the viewer.”
COSCARELLI Has it worked as armor for your personal life and your history?
CAIN It also creates problems that you don’t realize. I thought it was going to protect me, and it was going to be Ethel Cain’s problem, but then you get into this kind of interesting thing where you start to get eclipsed by your own character. So I keep jumping across this line and doing this funny dance where I’m figuring out: “Where is she? Where am I? Who is she in relation to me? Do people know her better than they know me? Is it a good thing? Is it bad thing?” My relationship with the character and the entity of Ethel Cain really does change year to year.
JON CARAMANICA I think a lot of people who come into the industry, even if they don’t create a character with a name, they create a persona.
CAIN Oh, absolutely. You have to understand, if I’m going to go for this, you are accepting to let your life, all of your everything, be played out in front of other people. No matter how much or how little of yourself you decide to share, you are saying hello. You lose control and you have to be OK with that.
COSCARELLI I think having that lore, that back story, plus the dramatic presentation — the dresses, the religious imagery — was also a huge magnet. Do you think it worked as a marketing tactic, giving you a bigger audience than you might not have had if you just said, “I’m Hayden, a regular person from Florida, and here’s my music?”
CAIN I absolutely think that it did. I always had two minds about me: I do this because I’m passionate about the project. I love creating. I love world-building and weaving a web. I loved “Lord of the Rings” growing up, The Legend of Zelda, I love when something’s a breadcrumb. At the same time, I thought: “Well, I’m not really good at anything else. So if I’m going to go for this, I might as well try to make it at least profitable enough to live off of.”
I wanted something with the richness and the complexity of a fantasy series, but through the lens of a Southern Gothic, female-fronted kitchen-table drama. Because that’s what my childhood was, just watching all these women interact and hearing stories from my mother and my grandmother and my aunts and their friends, living in this stifling, small, evangelical community. I really loved the idea of kind of bringing that complexity and richness and drama and over-the-topness of a fantasy series to the very mundane, boring life that I grew up in.
It makes sense that that aspect carried the project, because when people bite into something, they want more, they want to rip it apart and see how far down it goes. Sometimes I feel like people love the story more than they even love the music.
COSCARELLI At the same time, we know about parasocial relationships on the internet, and there’s a downside. Over the last few weeks, you’ve been dealing a large amount of your past that has been resurfaced online. Some of it was offensive, which you seem to regret, and some you’ve said is being weaponized against you because of your identity as a trans artist.
CAIN It was very strange when it all happened because it was one domino after another, and there are aspects of it that you have to take accountability for — mistakes and actions that you have to atone for — and then there’s other aspects that are being weaponized purely out of malice.
I do like to consider myself a very open book and I’m by no means perfect. I come from a place that is very ass-backwards and it’s kind of crazy the things that you still learn every day that just don’t fly, things that are so deeply ingrained in you that you’re constantly having to work on.
COSCARELLI The part of it that you really seemed to want to address head-on was the use of racially offensive language and jokes.
CAIN Yes, because in this specific instant, somebody had asked me [on social media] if I’d ever used a racial slur. And I said, in all honesty, yes, I have used it before. The way in which I answered it was more flippant than it needed to be. Sometimes I’m deadpan and a bit more blunt in matters that do require more sensitivity. It’s one of the worst things you can do. It’s hateful. It was intentionally inflammatory. I said that in my statement.
I look back at a period of my life, when I was young and angry and lashing out at the world — it is deeply shameful and embarrassing to see that dredged back up, especially when I’ve created a project that is so built on trauma and healing. Moving forward, all I can really do now is try to use my platform to make right.
COSCARELLI You also come from a generation where your whole life, every up and down of it, is documented online.
CAIN I discovered and started sneaking onto the internet at all costs at about 15. It was kind of the escape from the life that I’d been living. And that culture on the internet at the time was so bad and so crazy, because it was a bunch of feral teens who were just so bonkers. I remember being on Stan Twitter before Stan Twitter was called that.
I had no followers, no friends, nobody was looking at me, so I was able to just take all this weird negativity that I’d built up in retaliation — that I could never spew out at the people in my life who maybe actually deserved it.
CARAMANICA You’ve also built this successful life, heading in a beautiful direction. Is part of the anxiety around this that it could undermine that?
CAIN I don’t come from this world. This was not mine. I never thought this would happen. So every day I get to do the job, I’m grateful. And if I ever lose it, especially by the consequences of my own actions, that would be my fault. So that to me wasn’t a worry.
The anxiety was just kind of, “Am I the worst person ever?” I like to tell myself I do the right thing, I try to be good to people, to stand by these values that I was raised with and then thinking, am I completely not doing that at all? It was a crisis of identity, like, “I’m the biggest hypocrite ever.”
I do have a very kind of reactionary, inflammatory side to me. I’ve always described myself as being a little badass 8-year-old boy who has been sent to live with grandma — and I’m simultaneously grandma. I feel like this child who acts before I think. But then I also like to think when the fire has subsided, this is the right thing to do. This is how you can make right: Be apologetic, atone, be accountable. And sometimes I get scared of who’s in the driver’s seat.
COSCARELLI I also want to talk about the flip side of your statement, which was standing up and saying, “I’m also being attacked as a trans artist.”
CAIN With my identity in this political time in America, you know, people are not going to like you. I don’t even want to say it out loud, but being accused of the things I was being accused of that were so —
COSCARELLI Glorifying child abuse, incest, bestiality …
CAIN Yes, all of those very, very vicious things, which are also the same things the queer community has often been attacked as — sexual deviants and perverts and whatnot. It’s a huge thing. Queer people are to this day attacked with all kinds of slanderous material. And I wanted to point that out.
COSCARELLI You talked about warring impulses within you that are also in the music that got you here — this push and pull between pop and anti-pop. You were signed to Prescription Songs, the label and publishing company of Dr. Luke, the premier centrist American hitmaker. But you followed your breakout success with a drone album. How much of that is taste and how much is trolling?
CAIN Again, it’s like, “Who’s in the driver’s seat?” A lot of times it starts with that little badass kid: I want to be reactionary, I want to get attention, like the EPs, “Inbred,” “Perverts,” the names alone. I try to let the 8-year-old drive less and less as I get older, but sometimes we hop in the driver’s seat and it’s like, “OK, let’s do something crazy.”
When I first started making music, it was literally me and GarageBand. I said: “Well, I’m not going to have a career. Nobody’s ever going to know who I am, I can do whatever I want.” I was making Gregorian chant music. I was making electronic music, I was making pop music, I was making ambient music, I was making spoken word pieces — whatever tickled my fancy.
With people watching, with “Preacher’s Daughter,” I thought: “Well, I do have to be business-minded. I do have to clean up some of the sludgier, dronier aspects of this and make it more palatable.” I have people who are counting on me, there’s money involved. So I was like, “Let’s put a pop song on there, try to grab audiences.” And if you come for the pop, stay for the drone, or the eight-minute piano ballad that follows it.
But also, as someone who comes from Stan Twitter, I know the way that they treat pop stars as opposed to rock artists or women in alternative spaces. I don’t want my life picked apart like that. I was very scared to get labeled that because I thought, “Here come the piranhas.” But also that’s my penance. Sometimes I look at this and I say, “I deserve this.”
COSCARELLI How did the business impulses, the realities of this becoming a career, affect the art going into this album?
CAIN You have to accept when you make a business out of your passion, it is going to fundamentally forever change the way that you create. You only get one debut. I will never make a record the way I made “Preacher’s Daughter,” which has been heartbreaking over the past couple years of realizing that.
“Willoughby Tucker” was a very different process. A lot more frustration, a lot more heartbreak, a lot emptier. I cried every day that I was finishing it because I just thought, “Will I ever love this again?” The only thing I have ever truly, deeply, unequivocally loved in my whole life was telling stories and making music. And the fact that I feel nothing for making music right now, for this portion, that was hard.
I don’t care what music people want from me. But it’s still like, this is what funds my life. I do not want to have to go back to working a day job like I did for so many years to fund the music. So I do have to find the compromise of, we put out an album, I tour it, I make a pop song or two, and I enjoy that. But then I will make an hour-and-a-half-long drone album.
The only way that you could really fail personally is if you stop indulging and start only thinking about business. You have to do both at the same time.
COSCARELLI So where are you at with your record deal and the future of your career?
CAIN I will be independent as of this record’s release. I’m looking forward to being fully in control of my everything moving forward. I want to leave behind a long legacy of art that was genuine and heartfelt, that’s not for anybody else, but I can look back on and say: “I really gave it my all and I have a lot of good memories attached. And a lot of bad memories attached, too, but like I lived my life through those projects.” That to me is what success will look like.
Watch the full episode here and follow Popcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music or YouTube.
Joe Coscarelli is a culture reporter for The Times who focuses on popular music and a co-host of the Times podcast “Popcast (Deluxe).”
Jon Caramanica is a pop music critic who hosts “Popcast,” The Times’s music podcast.
The post Ethel Cain, Pop’s Experimental Problem Child, Will Never Be the Same appeared first on New York Times.
