Pennsylvania’s singer-songwriter Hayden Anhedonia, aka Ethel Cain released (though earlier in the year, she released Perverts – an ambient album) her follow up to 2022’s impressive, southern-gothic rock opera, Preacher’s Daughter steeped in gloomy slowcore atmosphere. Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You retains the somnolent, oppressive atmospheres, furious subtext and lengthy tracks (nearly 80 minutes in length) that made Preacher’s Daughter an original take on the singer-songwriter model. The successor feels less conceptual, though formally Hayden framed it as a prequel to the narrative from Preacher’s Daughter. The tracks are generally more genre-specific and recognisable. It has less of the spontaneously creative pieces of the previous album but is on the other hand, more learned and matured take on her psychological and sensory songwriting model.
The first track,Janie, on wistful electric guitar, is a trademark slow, burning nocturne – like a slowed-down and stripped-back Smashing Pumpkins song. Fuck Me Eyes is her latest update on the gloom-pop template that inspired American Teenager and Crush with shimmering synthesisers, brooding guitars hanging in the background and a dreamy lament that altogether is not too dissimilar from what Chromatics were making in the 2010s.Nettles is instead the new Thoroughfare, with a marching country rhythm, supported by plaintative violin before the second half evolves into a gentle folky shuffle. Between these tracks are Willoughby’s Theme and Interlude, which are perhaps, the most oppressive tracks: the former with piano and crumbling electronics and guitar feedback and the latter, a cacophonous drone dirge that draws inspiration from her Perverts project, earlier in the year. Dust Bowl returns to the slowcore format, sounding like a tribute to Duster on guitar but with a lugubrious incantation. The gentle, mumbled Grouper-esque folk elegy A Knock at the Door is another peak of melancholy, eventually dissolving into barren echoes. Radio Towers, vocal-less, uses field recordings and ambiance, sounding like Biosphere but in the context of such an album, Mount Eerie (who engage in a similar doom-folk). The 10-minute psychodrama, Tempest with waves of angst-filled vocals and sinister guitars is Have A Nice Life-graded misery before it erupts into a cathartic finale. Not to finish there, Hayden cools things down with Radio Towers – a 15-minute slow, marching litany (a la Red House Painters) which flourishes into a melancholic whirlwind of guitar and crooning before gradually limping out on disparate piano notes.
Few artists since Phil Elverum so powerfully combined the worlds of folk and rock music with ambient and doom. Hayden has coined an entire new approach to emotional storytelling in rock music through her tortured and phantasmal style that fuses noisy experimentation, atmospheric sculpting and the harmonies of popular music, derived from more experimental artists like Lingua Ignota. We see evidence on this album that Hayden has expanded her arsenal especially on the instrumental tracks, which are sometimes equally as affecting as the slowcore behemoths. The album feels transitional – less of a statement than its predecessor but more or less maintaining the momentum and adding to her canon of depressive litanies and atmospheric exorcisms.
Label: Daughters of Cain (via AWAL)
Released: August 8, 2025
Losing My Edge Rating: 7/10
Best Tracks: Janie, Dust Bowl, Tempest, Radio Towers