By Cameryn Bentler
These crosses all over my body / Remind me of who I used to be.
This lyric is the opening line of Ethel Cain’s Preacher’s Daughter, an entirely self-produced debut album released in May of 2022. This single lyric, backed by haunting synth vocals and distorted sounds of a preacher giving a sermon, sets the tone for the entire album. Preacher’s Daughter deals with themes of generational trauma, undeniable fate, and religious trauma.
If this album could be a real-life object, it would be a putrid, overgrown and mossy southern Baptist church overtaken by the trauma of devout believers and time.
The Floridian singer-songwriter, Hayden Anhedönia (the face and mind behind the Ethel Cain character) knows what this southern gothic rot looks like, smells like, and feels like. She’s experienced it firsthand – often speaking in interviews of her own upbringing in a rural southern Baptist community, it is no secret where she draws her inspiration for this album from.
What separates this album from any debut album is the cohesive, song-by-song story she tells within the production and lyrics. Preacher’s Daughter is the story of a woman (Ethel Cain) who is plagued by the loss of her abusive father, who is the town’s revered preacher, and her first lover, Willoughby Tucker, and eventually meeting her untimely demise similar to Shakespeare’s “Ophelia” only more frightening.
Preacher’s Daughter is a gritty, edgy and emotional album speaking through sharp lyricism of the worst flaws of humanity. Songs like “Hard Times” and “Strangers” amplify that theme through raw depictions of violence like sexual abuse and cannibalism.
It is no secret that the fate of Cain is not a happy one – going from one man to the next, in a futile attempt to cope with the loss of her lover Willoughby (as depicted in the simple-production piano of “A House in Nebraska”), only to be met with the wrath of her last partner, Isaiah Abrams. He is as abusive as her father was, and he ultimately murders Cain. We see a fresh perspective on life throughout death, and listening to her story, death almost seems like a mercy to Cain.
Despite these traumatic tales, Cain knows how to dry her listeners’ tears with more upbeat sounds. “American Teenager”, a contemporary pop piece sampling Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’” begins and ends with an iconic, loud, soundbite of a guitar. If there’s one thing Cain has mastered, it is her ability to make a spunky song lyrically devastating: The neighbor’s body came home in a box / but he wanted to go / so maybe it was his fault / another red heart taken by the American dream. Through the synth-pop, loud drums, and 80’s inspired guitar solos – one look into the reality of this song shows it’s not the commercial poppy song it seems to be at the surface.
In “Thoroughfare,” Cain blends blues-scales, country, and rural sounds into a story about a Western expedition with the man she met on the road and falls in love with. It is Southern twang in its purest form, with clear elements of Cain’s sound and lyricism.
Ethel Cain, although more of a star in the cult music realm, is clearly a sharp musician with a tremendous capacity for deft, suspenseful narratives. This story, albeit fictional, touches the hearts of every listener. Within each song, each line, is a piece of disgusting honesty – the kind no one’s willing to admit to others – or even themselves.
