Ethel Cain is turning the page

Taken from the autumn 25 issue of THE FACE. Get your copy here.

On a hot June morning in a North London photography studio, Hayden Anhedönia is looking at herself in a mirror, a makeup artist working at one end, a pedicurist at the other. Assistants and managers busy themselves in the wings as the 27-year-old slips into character as Ethel Cain, the fictional tearaway whose short life and gruesome death unfold on her acclaimed 2022 debut album, Preacher’s Daughter, a slow-burning song cycle of sepia-toned ballads and subverted Americana.

Since introducing the world to Ethel – exaggerated alter ego, boy-crazy antihero and ​“kind of a little asshole”, as she happily points out – Anhedönia has been catapulted to an almost debilitating level of fame. In just a few years, she’s attracted an army of die-hard fans, walked runways for Miu Miu and Eckhaus Latta, and watched as her biggest single American Teenager, the twisted heartland pop anthem from Preacher’s Daughter, snowballed past 100 million streams.

Somehow, that quasi-concept album about seedy affairs, religious trauma, sex, murder and cannibalism made Ethel Cain some kind of pop star. Or, as she puts it today with a visible shudder, ​“lumped in as the new pop girl”. Before long, and while in the midst of the lengthy run of international shows she played in support of the album – the Freezer Bride and Blood Stained Blonde tours of 2022 and 2023 – Anhedönia was openly wishing for her fanbase to shrink and claiming to ​“hate pop music, hate my career – just throwing temper tantrums”.

​“Going from being an autistic, homeschooled shut-in a small, conservative religious town in the Florida Panhandle until I was 18 years old, to becoming this within about five years,” she says, gesturing at the muchness of it all, ​“has been the most mind-boggling switch-up I can imagine”.

The bad news is that her new album, Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You, is unlikely to change that trajectory. Perched on a sofa before her FACE photo shoot, Anhedönia has the quiet glow of someone confident that she’s sitting on her best work. In jeans and a baggy sweater, her off-duty look is part high-fashion waif, part bad babysitter. Her forehead tattoo – spelling out the Hebrew names of the angel Gabriel and the demon Ashmodai – peeks out from under her mouse-brown curtains, while her tattooed left hand is now blacked out from wrist to fingertip.

Dreamier and drowsier than Preacher’s Daughter, Willoughby… winds back the clock to the character Ethel’s stormy adolescence. Even before it’s released, the four-month Willoughby Tucker Forever international tour – which takes place this summer and autumn, and includes five nights at London’s 5,000 capacity Eventim Apollo – has sold out.

The album is set in the late ​’80s and early ​’90s, before Ethel’s fatal misadventures, and takes cues from the music and movies of the era. ​“I always ask myself what it would’ve been like to be in high school with my parents, being in the Deep South in the late ​’80s, going to tailgate parties, being out late, getting into trouble,” Anhedönia says.

Through slow-motion reveries, delicate doom-folk and moonlit interludes, Willoughby… introduces the heartaches and rivalries that set Ethel on her path of self-destruction. But Anhedönia’s latest full-length record also conceals a story about its creator, as she steers a fresh course after ​“a big crisis of faith” as a songwriter.

The past year has been an opportunity to reset, she says. She’d returned to her home state from her place in Pittsburgh to finish the album, taking comfort in Florida’s ​“stuck in a loop” mentality. ​“I can go other places and see other things,” she says, ​“but everything I’ve ever been is wrapped up in this little pocket of America.”

Last year, Anhedönia decided to pause a trilogy of albums she had planned about the ​“daughters of Cain” (Ethel, her mother and grandmother), a gruesome family saga that she’s been slowly mapping out for years (her label imprint is also called Daughters of Cain Records). Instead, she absorbed herself in Perverts, a 90-minute suite of sleazy, greyed-out industrial noisescapes, which she surprise released this January. There, a cracked rendition of hymn Nearer, My God, to Thee rubs up against the buzz of a vibrator and ghostly pianos disintegrate under muffled vocals.

​“I was so angry at myself for being so attentive to the reaction to Preacher’s Daughter that I said, ​‘I’m going to make Perverts exactly how I want it, and then I’m going to not care,’” is her explanation for the record’s oppressive, vaporous sound. Like Lou Reed dropping Metal Machine Music, an hour of ear-splitting guitar squall, three years after hitting a commercial home run on Transformer, Perverts was meant to wipe the slate clean for a musician who never wanted to be mainstream in the first place.

Buoyed by releasing a record entirely on her own terms, she returned to an older batch of songs with renewed swagger, ready to flesh out Ethel’s backstory. The sexually charged ambience of Perverts still lurks in Willoughby…, beneath the top notes of fragrant hillbilly folk, strung-out slowcore and long, winding instrumentals.

Early drafts of the album were more grounded in the geography of Shady Grove, the fictional Southern town where the Cain saga takes place: the trailer Willoughby lives in; the dirt roads Ethel walks down. But with her head still ​“twisted up in the mindset” of Perverts, the setting turned surreal and swampy, abandoning the town for an ​“endless kaleidoscope of flora” seen through a haze of weed gummies and dust.

Working alone usually suits her. She’s produced almost every Ethel Cain song herself, and plays most of the instruments, too, with occasional support from collaborators such as musician Matthew Tomasi. It’s an approach that seems designed to make life hard for herself. ​“I never look up tutorials. I take stabs in the dark and see what happens,” she says. ​“I don’t know what is wrong with me, why I won’t look up help for certain things.” But her decision to write, produce and mix Willoughby… herself wasn’t entirely through choice: she spent the winter stuck at home on probation.

So far, so Ethel. Accessory to a crime, perhaps? Bar brawl? No, just a traffic violation. But it meant she was trapped in Florida until her court appearance in January, with no option but to mix the record herself. She admits that she was ​“petrified”. Finishing the album ​“was mind-boggling. I cried every single day and I hit my head on the desk and just thought: I want this to be over.” The plan was to deliver a cleaner, more subdued sound than she captured on Preacher’s Daughter. ​“I got the opposite of that. It is a loud, crunchy, saturated to-the-max record,” she laughs.

In early June, Anhedönia released the first single, Nettles, a banjo, fiddle and pedal steel-layered ballad dedicated to Willoughby, a boy who is the ideal of the ​“quintessential sweet first love”. ​“We were in a race to grow up,” she sings gently, inhabiting Ethel in her spider-silk voice. ​“Think of us inside after the wedding.” Like all the characters in her songs, Willoughby is ​“a stand-in for me processing the way that I live my life”, but it’s a dysfunctional relationship.

Instead of loving him as a person, Ethel imagines Willoughby as a ​“two-dimensional white knight”. ​“You have to be careful with the pedestal that you put someone on,” Anhedönia says. ​“That’s a very big life lesson that Ethel learns – or doesn’t learn. I learned that lesson through her.” Willoughby might get his name in the album title but he’s far from Ethel’s only teenage obsession. On Janie, she’s angry and heartbroken after her best friend starts seeing a boy over the summer they turn 16, ​“and Ethel immediately thinks: there goes my whole world. She’s been taken away from me. It’s this childish but very real fear of being abandoned,” says Anhedönia, gossiping about her characters as if they were flesh and blood.

So much drama over these boys who barely have a speaking part. Surely what Ethel really needs in her life is a good woman? A tough, jaded Louise to her vulnerable Thelma? ​“That’s what Janie was,” Anhedönia nods, ​“her first love. They’re in the bushes by the creek in the abandoned houses, talking about their futures.” Anhedönia tells me this in our second conversation, a week after our London meeting. She’s video-calling from her current home in Tallahassee in northern Florida. Wearing the same grey sweater she had on pre-shoot and framed by a painting of a southern live oak tree on the wall behind her, she’s relaxed and talkative – there’s so much to explain.

In the lorecore era of pop, where fans pore over lyrics and social media posts like religious scholars, the scale and ambition of Anhedönia’s world-building is at the core of her appeal, along with her stranger-than-fiction backstory. Raised in the tightknit Southern Baptist town of Perry, not far from the Gulf of Mexico, Anhedönia grew up the eldest of four children and, like Ethel, the daughter of a church deacon.

Homeschooled and classically trained as a pianist, she spent much of her childhood singing in church with her mother and claims not to have heard pop music until she was a teenager, with Hot N Cold by Katy Perry serving as her introduction to profane music. Shunned by the community when she came out as gay at 15, Anhedönia faced an isolated and conformist adolescence. ​“There was not a lot of room in my hometown to express myself. My sister and I had our clothes picked out for us pretty much until graduation,” she remembers.

One of the obvious threads that connects Anhedönia with Ethel is their shared defiance of gender norms. Ethel’s ​“raw, tomboyish spirit” takes Anhedönia back to her own childhood, which she remembers as almost ​“like Little House on the Prairie,” with the freedom to go ​“running around barefoot with the boys, jumping in the fishing hole”. At 20, Anhedönia came out as trans in a post on Facebook. Not long before, she’d stumbled on the idea of Ethel after buying herself a flowing white dress and being struck by the vision of a young woman with long brown hair, standing in a wheat field.

That’s the famous image of Ethel, the girl who sits in the front pews for Sunday service, but it’s only one side of her. Other times she can peel off the feminine frills just like any other costume. ​“Girls can sweat, girls can be nasty and stinky, and it doesn’t mean anything about anything,” she says, warming to the topic. ​“In terms of actions and behaviour and appearance, there is no wrong way to be a woman.”

Not long after that Facebook post, she adopted the name Hayden Silas Anhedönia – the surname (without the umlaut) a psychiatric term meaning a reduced ability to experience pleasure – and informed her mother she was taking hormones. She then took off for Tallahassee, the nearest big city. It was there that ​“all hell broke loose”. Anhedönia shaved off her eyebrows, started listening to Crystal Castles and ​“a ton of Polish witch house”, and spent her evenings ​“smoking and taking pills in my closet” after clocking off from her day job as a nail technician.

​“Doing drugs and handling sharp objects around sensitive skin,” she confirms drily. ​“Luckily I never sent anybody to the hospital, by the grace of God.” Nights were spent at a goth club, ​“high out of my brain, 10-inch leather platform heels, going crazy.“

That’s when she started working on her own music, and while the witch house phase didn’t last, drugs still ​“cycle in and out of my life”, she admits. ​“As an autistic person, every now and then I get a little bit too overwhelmed and overstimulated by being sober. I’ll have a stint where I sedate myself and take some kind of a downer. Never uppers, because I’m highly strung enough as it is.”

For a while she thought she might be bipolar, until she noticed how much she has in common with her autistic best friend and ended up with her own diagnosis. Recently, she’s started to wonder if she might have OCD, too. ​“It’s definitely a fun cocktail of wiring up there.” Still, it’s hard to square this description of her inner life with the serene and self-possessed woman in front of me.

​“It limits the way that I’m able to perform,” she says. ​“It limits even being able to drive with the windows down, because when a hair touches my face, I feel like I’m being stabbed in the cheek. It’s quite ridiculous.” After Tallahassee, Anhedönia clicked her heels and set out on the semi-nomadic life she still leads, pitching up in towns across Indiana, Pennsylvania, Texas and, finally, Alabama, where she rented an old converted church and went method, living and writing as Ethel.

Along the way she road-tested various aliases and styles (pop covers, shadowy electronics, Gregorian chants) before settling on a sound closer to her roots, pitched somewhere between the wild open highways of the West and the green, green grass of the Bible Belt. Starting in 2019, she released three EPs under the name Ethel Cain, including her 2021 breakout, Inbred.

Across that period, she used those dark, dramatic songs and Ethel’s catastrophic life choices to process a lifetime of big feelings, from residual heartache over boys, family and God to the pent-up frustrations of a lonely homeschooler. At no point, however, did she imagine that she was writing pop music. Her touchstones were the violent fantasies of Southern gothic art and literature, slowcore bands like cult ​’90s group Duster and even gospel and opera.

The early demos for Preacher’s Daughter were ​“a lot more lo-fi, more sludgy, a lot slower,” she says, but at the last minute she decided to give them a poppier glow. Having signed a publishing deal in 2020 with Prescription Songs – the company owned by disgraced pop producer Dr. Luke – she reasoned that ​“if my very first album is a flop, I will be in debt to this company forever. So let’s make it a bit more accessible in the hope that I can recoup this deal and get the hell out of Dodge.” (As to why she signed that deal in the first place: in 2022, she told the New York Times that when she signed the deal, she was unaware who owned the company, saying, ​“I’m not Googling CEOs when I’m eating a candy bar. I was unemployed and it was a pandemic. I didn’t have the option to turn down money.”)

The reactions to Preacher’s Daughter, the first of her records to appear on her Daughters of Cain imprint, revealed that Anhedönia’s idea of ​“accessible” wasn’t quite in tune with most people’s. She bristles at the memory of one listener heaping praise on American Teenager but dismissing the rest of the album as ​“way too long and slow”. ​“I got scared that people thought that it was a very unsuccessful, long, boring pop album, instead of very successful at being exactly what I wanted it to be,” she says.

Of course, hundreds of thousands of other listeners thought differently. After failing to chart upon its release three years ago, this April, Preacher’s Daughter was released on vinyl and Anhedönia duly cracked the Top 10 of the Billboard chart – becoming the first openly trans musician to do so. Her legions of fans copy her tattoos, send her gifts (everything from packs of cigarettes to a corset covered in severed dolls’ heads) and make their own bumper stickers (“I’m crying listening to Ethel Cain and I can barely see where I’m going”).

Sometimes, though, their adoration has come at a cost. Her concerts have become notorious for bad behaviour, with fans elbowing each other at the barrier and shouting out during quiet songs. Anhedönia has had to take to social media to beg fans to ​“be kind to each other in line!!” at her concerts, complaining that ​“nobody takes anything seriously anymore” and eventually deleting her Twitter after feeling too exposed.

The latter action came after fans scrutinised her love life on Reddit and hacked into her SoundCloud to pilfer old songs. At the same time, she’s also attracted media attention for her public support for Palestine (including a call to ​“bring back assassinations” following then-US President Biden’s support of the Israeli military) and for the accused CEO killer Luigi Mangione.

But in the weeks leading up to the release of Willoughby…, after we spoke for the second time, the exposure turned darker. A cache of dug up posts revealed that, eight years earlier, a teenage Anhedönia had made racist and inflammatory jokes online – a charge she accepted in a lengthy apology posted in a Google Doc – while further X posts accused her of trivialising incest and even making child pornography in a drawing, something she strongly denied.

A day later, her Spotify page was hacked and spammed with transphobic images. ​“There is so much ridiculous material being used to slander me right now,” she wrote in that 2,000-word statement, urging her fans to ​“recognise the patterns of a transphobic smear campaign” while also admitting to a teenage period in which she tried to be as ​“inflammatory and controversial as possible”. Reading the statement, I remembered what she said about how much her life had changed in five years. It’s hard not to gesture at the muchness of it all.

Maybe there’s an alternate timeline in which Anhedönia is still lurking in the underground, tending to a small yet die-hard fanbase with a drip-feed of gory song morsels and staying safely out of the limelight, both as a musician and as a public-facing trans woman. But you suspect that being so popular – if not exactly pop – was almost inevitable for her. It’s not just the emotional power of the songs, or the immaculate shimmer of her voice. It’s everything: her obvious intellect, how great she looks in a billowing white dress, her total control over everything from concept to mixdown. She even has plans for books and films about Ethel. That kind of ambition demands scale.

At the same time, the Cain family saga is only getting darker and less suitable for a general audience. While Willoughby… is an important part of the Ethel Cain Cinematic Universe, the next album in the trilogy proper is set to be Preacher’s Wife, a ​“more insular, suffocating, claustrophobic” story. ​“Life imitates art in a very funny way with this project,” she notes. ​“I was finishing Willoughby… in the first few months of my new relationship, and all those feelings about love were getting dredged up for the first time since high school.”

For Preacher’s Wife, she’ll be writing about a grown-up couple just as she settles into her own version of that dynamic for the first time. ​“Why am I always going through the same thing that Ethel’s going through? I don’t get it,” she smiles. The final chapter, Mother of a Preacher, is set to be the bloodiest of the three: ​“Let’s just say I hope I don’t manifest the circumstances of that album [in] my real life,” she teases, as if spooked by her own imaginative powers.

Before all that, something even scarier: Willoughby Tucker Forever, another dauntingly huge tour. Her natural introversion, not to mention that ​“fun cocktail of wiring”, has always put the fear factor into performing live. On earlier tours, Anhedönia’s tactic was to ​“grip the mic stand and kind of push through”, as she told The Guardian just weeks after fainting onstage at Sydney Opera House.

This time, the shows will be less ​“lackadaisical”, she promises, ​“less like I’m up here fighting for my life”. The promotional cycle is also intended to be less hectic, with this FACE cover story one of the very few interviews she will do. ​“I’m really prioritising not getting sent to the nuthouse,” she adds, dryly. In the wake of the Spotify hack, her statement baldly called out her attackers for harassment and bullying, ​“with the end goal of me killing myself”. By identifying the danger to herself and publicly naming it, she also partially defanged it.

That’s the thing about these new pop girls – they bite back. They advocate for themselves. They refuse to stay in their lane. ​“Labels don’t matter to me like they did three or four years ago,” Anhedönia states, perhaps as much to herself as anyone else. ​“I will go on to make pop music, and I will go on to make more drone music, and I’ll go on to make more of everything in between.” While Ethel’s fate was always sealed, Hayden’s the one holding the pen.

HAIR Anthony Turner at Jolly Collective MAKEUP Lynsey Alexander at Jolly Collective MANICURIST Jenny Longworth at Streeters PRODUCTION Partner Films EXECUTIVE PRODUCER Cara Gillies PRODUCER Imogen Stoddart PRODUCTION MANAGER Cat Pavitschitz PHOTOGRAPHER’S ASSISTANTS Lex Kembery, Simon Mackinlay and Jess Pearson STYLIST’S ASSISTANTS Amilia Howells, Ada Matylda and Maia Burt HAIR ASSISTANT John Allan MAKEUP ASSISTANT Sarah Edenborough