Singer Ethel Cain admits she is 'not proud' of disturbing posts after backlash

‘I've long struggled with my identity in pop': Ethel Cain on fandom, first loves, and being inspired by David Lynch

The Guardian

2 days ago

The Guardian

‘I've long struggled with my identity in pop': Ethel Cain on fandom, first loves, and being inspired by David Lynch

Something strange happened to Hayden Anhedönia in January. The 27-year-old artist known professionally as Ethel Cain was finishing off her upcoming album Willoughby Tucker, I'll Always Love You when she had to go to court. 'I got into some traffic trouble,' she says coyly in her soft southern lilt. The plan was to drive from the courthouse in her home city of Tallahassee, Florida, to Toronto to wrap the album with her longtime collaborator Matthew Tomasi. 'Listen,' she continues, leaning forward into her webcam – a glint behind the eyes, conspiratorial tone in the voice. 'I don't know what happened in that courthouse, but I walked out of there having been put on probation. I couldn't go to Canada. I couldn't go anywhere.' As a result, Tomasi flew down to Tallahassee. They holed up in Anhedönia's tiny home studio and didn't leave until it was done. When they weren't working, they watched Twin Peaks for the first time. 'Every day it was wake up, work, Twin Peaks, work, Twin Peaks, work …' They binged the whole thing in two weeks. Anhedönia even hunted down the synths that composer Angelo Badalamenti used on the soundtrack and sprinkled them on a few of her own tracks. One night they finished working, watched the final episode, and went to bed. She woke up to the news that David Lynch had passed away. 'I was really happy that I finished the show while he was still alive,' she says. The synths 'felt kind of like an homage. A way to keep David and Angelo and Laura [Palmer] alive in some small way.' Lynch's work stages epic battles between darkness and light, pitting the purity of the individual against the corruption of the world; small-town life versus primordial forces of evil. The same battle plays out on Willoughby Tucker, which tells the story of what Anhedönia describes as 'a deeply traumatised love story between two kids who are in love, but the world weighs on them'. It's also present in her debut album, 2022's Preacher's Daughter, a southern gothic tale of a teenage girl named Ethel Cain who flees the confines of her religious upbringing only to be murdered and cannibalised by her boyfriend. The grisly subject matter made for unlikely breakthrough material, but Preacher's Daughter ended up becoming one of 2022's most critically lauded pop breakouts. In the space of a few months, Anhedönia jumped from collaborating with niche SoundCloud rappers to being featured in Forbes' 30 Under 30 and fronting campaigns for Givenchy, Marc Jacobs and Miu Miu. When Preacher's Daughter was rereleased on vinyl this April, it broke into the Top 10 in the UK, Australia, the Netherlands and the US, where Anhedönia made history as the first publicly trans musician to reach the Top 10 of the Billboard albums chart. As far as ascents to fame go, Anhedönia's was a baptism of fire. She has attracted the kind of invasive, obsessive fandom typically reserved for A-list pop stars. Owing to her sharp cultural commentary and eviscerating political takes – in a viral post after Trump's election, she wrote 'If you voted for Trump, I hope that peace never finds you' – her social media accounts are routinely trawled for 'problematic' content, and her criticism of the US healthcare system has been discussed on Fox News. Speaking to the Guardian in July 2023, Anhedönia expressed a desire 'to have a much smaller fanbase'. 'I've long struggled with my identity in pop,' she reasons now. 'I love pop music, but my issue for a while was the way fandoms operate.' Having seen the violence and trauma of Preacher's Daughter spun into flippant memes, she had feared that any future release would be similarly received. 'I've since made my peace with that. At the end of the day, you make what you make and you put it out and people can do what they want with it.' A recent firestorm over screenshots of things posted when she was 19, however, shows how merciless the spotlight can be. A slew of comments, including the use of racial slurs and rape jokes, were dug up from a 'shameful' period during which she tried to be as 'inflammatory and controversial as possible', as she phrased it in a lengthy apology. 'That was my account and those were my words', she wrote, adding that she was now 'truly sorry from the bottom of my heart'. But she hit back at further online speculation that she was 'pedophile, a zoophile, or a porn-addicted incest fetishist'. She had been, she wrote, the target of a 'transphobic/otherwise targeted smear campaign' that had also led to her personal accounts being hacked and family doxed and harrassed. Anhedönia holds several positions that can be hard to reconcile. She's a trans woman who grew up in the conservative southern Baptist community in the Florida panhandle, and still has a deep love affair with the area. She looks like one of the ethereal sisters from The Virgin Suicides, and talks like a girl next door refilling your coffee at a roadside diner, peppering her musings on existentialism and Eraserhead with homely expressions of geez and whatnot. She has experienced sexual trauma and assault, while her music often leans – in her words – 'into sadomasochism' and 'the taboo'. Those nuances are often not acknowledged. 'A lot of people don't know how to interface with media that contains negativity or perversion or sexuality or immorality,' she says. 'It's not the first instinct to engage with these things critically – but when you see a bad character on screen, the movie shouldn't hold your hand and say: Hey, that's the bad guy. That's your job.' In January, Anhedönia released Perverts – an experimental departure from Preacher's Daughter, let alone standard pop fare. Billed as a standalone project, the hour-and-a-half sprawl of ambient, drone and slowcore compositions roots around themes of shame, guilt and pleasure. There are no hooks, no choruses and barely any lyrics. Rather, its unsettling blend of industrial murmurs and desolate spoken word reflects Anhedönia's experience of wandering 'the Great Dark' – her term for a brief but 'scary' winter when she was struggling to adjust to life after coming off tour. Some listeners found it a challenging listen; others considered its references to madness and masturbation alienating. But it successfully reasserted the wide spectrum of Anhedönia's music, which switches from soaring heartland pop-rock to sprawling abstract noise. 'Now that the other end of the Ethel Cain spectrum has been established, I feel like I have a full range,' Anhedönia says. Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion The second instalment of the Preacher's trilogy, Willoughby Tucker serves as the prequel to Preacher's Daughter, and has a similar structure – a pop-oriented first half full of youthful optimism, which plunges into slow burning instrumentals and thundering power ballads as the hammer of reality comes down. Beginning in the summer of 1986, it finds Ethel Cain as an insecure teenager 'trying to navigate her first love in a broken world and a broken town'. It wasn't the plan to go back in time. Anhedönia intended to move forward, on to more 'mature' things, but something kept nagging at her. 'That Ethel's entire story began with the love that she had for this boy … It felt like it needed telling. And come hell or high water, it was going to get told. It was practically seeping out of me.' Finishing the album was 'honestly really sad, especially knowing where Preacher's Daughter goes. Sometimes it's hard for me to listen to. I tell myself it's all fictional, but sometimes I'll catch a lyric and it'll resonate exactly with how I'm feeling. And I remember that it's coming from me.' Part of the difficulty in making Willoughby Tucker was the fact that Anhedönia had, at 27, recently entered into her first ever relationship. As she worked on this album, all her own 16-year-old anxieties came back. 'Love was always my final frontier,' she says. 'I never explored it. I never processed anything. I never progressed past the idea of love that I had as a teenager.' There were times when she was crying every day, begging for the album to be finished. She's glad of the process now. 'I see Ethel Cain as a piece of me that I separate from myself and discard, so that I can make good decisions in life,' she says. 'If Preacher's Daughter was my learning experience of what not to do with trauma and healing, Willoughby Tucker has been my experience of what not to do in love.' In the real world, bleak as it is, Anhedönia is determined to live well. Smiling between two long curtains of mousey brown hair, she reels off a list of reasons to get up in the morning: 'A great breakfast, a beautiful sunrise, paying for someone's groceries if they can't.' And then there is love – in her view the most 'high-risk, high-reward' feeling in the world. A few days before we speak, she 'hard launched' her new relationship, sharing a video of her new boyfriend lifting her up on a truck parked on a dirt road, and kissing her. 'Ethel Cain lived and died loving and praying to be loved back,' Anhedönia says. 'The entire Preacher's trilogy is centred around love. Love lost, love gained, love perverted, love stolen. Love is everything to us. It doesn't matter what you love or who you love, but that you love something – and that love is what propels you forward every day. For better or worse, I think that is a beautiful thing.' Willoughby Tucker, I'll Always Love You is released on 8 August.

The Guardian

4 days ago

The Guardian

‘I've long struggled with my identity in pop': Ethel Cain on fandom, first loves, and being inspired by David Lynch

Something strange happened to Hayden Anhedönia in January. The 27-year-old artist known professionally as Ethel Cain was finishing off her upcoming album Willoughby Tucker, I'll Always Love You when she had to go to court. 'I got into some traffic trouble,' she says coyly in her soft southern lilt. The plan was to drive from the courthouse in her home city of Tallahassee, Florida, to Toronto to wrap the album with her longtime collaborator Matthew Tomasi. 'Listen,' she continues, leaning forward into her webcam – a glint behind the eyes, conspiratorial tone in the voice. 'I don't know what happened in that courthouse, but I walked out of there having been put on probation. I couldn't go to Canada. I couldn't go anywhere.' As a result, Tomasi flew down to Tallahassee. They holed up in Anhedönia's tiny home studio and didn't leave until it was done. When they weren't working, they watched Twin Peaks for the first time. 'Every day it was wake up, work, Twin Peaks, work, Twin Peaks, work …' They binged the whole thing in two weeks. Anhedönia even hunted down the synths that composer Angelo Badalamenti used on the soundtrack and sprinkled them on a few of her own tracks. One night they finished working, watched the final episode, and went to bed. She woke up to the news that David Lynch had passed away. 'I was really happy that I finished the show while he was still alive,' she says. The synths 'felt kind of like an homage. A way to keep David and Angelo and Laura [Palmer] alive in some small way.' Lynch's work stages epic battles between darkness and light, pitting the purity of the individual against the corruption of the world; small-town life versus primordial forces of evil. The same battle plays out on Willoughby Tucker, which tells the story of what Anhedönia describes as 'a deeply traumatised love story between two kids who are in love, but the world weighs on them'. It's also present in her debut album, 2022's Preacher's Daughter, a southern gothic tale of a teenage girl named Ethel Cain who flees the confines of her religious upbringing only to be murdered and cannibalised by her boyfriend. The grisly subject matter made for unlikely breakthrough material, but Preacher's Daughter ended up becoming one of 2022's most critically lauded pop breakouts. In the space of a few months, Anhedönia jumped from collaborating with niche SoundCloud rappers to being featured in Forbes' 30 Under 30 and fronting campaigns for Givenchy, Marc Jacobs and Miu Miu. When Preacher's Daughter was rereleased on vinyl this April, it broke into the Top 10 in the UK, Australia, the Netherlands and the US, where Anhedönia made history as the first publicly trans musician to reach the Top 10 of the Billboard albums chart. As far as ascents to fame go, Anhedönia's was a baptism of fire. She has attracted the kind of invasive, obsessive fandom typically reserved for A-list pop stars. Owing to her sharp cultural commentary and eviscerating political takes – in a viral post after Trump's election, she wrote 'If you voted for Trump, I hope that peace never finds you' – her social media accounts are routinely trawled for 'problematic' content, and her criticism of the US healthcare system has been discussed on Fox News. Speaking to the Guardian in July 2023, Anhedönia expressed a desire 'to have a much smaller fanbase'. 'I've long struggled with my identity in pop,' she reasons now. 'I love pop music, but my issue for a while was the way fandoms operate.' Having seen the violence and trauma of Preacher's Daughter spun into flippant memes, she had feared that any future release would be similarly received. 'I've since made my peace with that. At the end of the day, you make what you make and you put it out and people can do what they want with it.' A recent firestorm over screenshots of things posted when she was 19, however, shows how merciless the spotlight can be. A slew of comments, including the use of racial slurs and rape jokes, were dug up from a 'shameful' period during which she tried to be as 'inflammatory and controversial as possible', as she phrased it in a lengthy apology. 'That was my account and those were my words', she wrote, adding that she was now 'truly sorry from the bottom of my heart'. But she hit back at further online speculation that she was 'pedophile, a zoophile, or a porn-addicted incest fetishist'. She had been, she wrote, the target of a 'transphobic/otherwise targeted smear campaign' that had also led to her personal accounts being hacked and family doxed and harrassed. Anhedönia holds several positions that can be hard to reconcile. She's a trans woman who grew up in the conservative southern Baptist community in the Florida panhandle, and still has a deep love affair with the area. She looks like one of the ethereal sisters from The Virgin Suicides, and talks like a girl next door refilling your coffee at a roadside diner, peppering her musings on existentialism and Eraserhead with homely expressions of geez and whatnot. She has experienced sexual trauma and assault, while her music often leans – in her words – 'into sadomasochism' and 'the taboo'. Those nuances are often not acknowledged. 'A lot of people don't know how to interface with media that contains negativity or perversion or sexuality or immorality,' she says. 'It's not the first instinct to engage with these things critically – but when you see a bad character on screen, the movie shouldn't hold your hand and say: Hey, that's the bad guy. That's your job.' In January, Anhedönia released Perverts – an experimental departure from Preacher's Daughter, let alone standard pop fare. Billed as a standalone project, the hour-and-a-half sprawl of ambient, drone and slowcore compositions roots around themes of shame, guilt and pleasure. There are no hooks, no choruses and barely any lyrics. Rather, its unsettling blend of industrial murmurs and desolate spoken word reflects Anhedönia's experience of wandering 'the Great Dark' – her term for a brief but 'scary' winter when she was struggling to adjust to life after coming off tour. Some listeners found it a challenging listen; others considered its references to madness and masturbation alienating. But it successfully reasserted the wide spectrum of Anhedönia's music, which switches from soaring heartland pop-rock to sprawling abstract noise. 'Now that the other end of the Ethel Cain spectrum has been established, I feel like I have a full range,' Anhedönia says. Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion The second instalment of the Preacher's trilogy, Willoughby Tucker serves as the prequel to Preacher's Daughter, and has a similar structure – a pop-oriented first half full of youthful optimism, which plunges into slow burning instrumentals and thundering power ballads as the hammer of reality comes down. Beginning in the summer of 1986, it finds Ethel Cain as an insecure teenager 'trying to navigate her first love in a broken world and a broken town'. It wasn't the plan to go back in time. Anhedönia intended to move forward, on to more 'mature' things, but something kept nagging at her. 'That Ethel's entire story began with the love that she had for this boy … It felt like it needed telling. And come hell or high water, it was going to get told. It was practically seeping out of me.' Finishing the album was 'honestly really sad, especially knowing where Preacher's Daughter goes. Sometimes it's hard for me to listen to. I tell myself it's all fictional, but sometimes I'll catch a lyric and it'll resonate exactly with how I'm feeling. And I remember that it's coming from me.' Part of the difficulty in making Willoughby Tucker was the fact that Anhedönia had, at 27, recently entered into her first ever relationship. As she worked on this album, all her own 16-year-old anxieties came back. 'Love was always my final frontier,' she says. 'I never explored it. I never processed anything. I never progressed past the idea of love that I had as a teenager.' There were times when she was crying every day, begging for the album to be finished. She's glad of the process now. 'I see Ethel Cain as a piece of me that I separate from myself and discard, so that I can make good decisions in life,' she says. 'If Preacher's Daughter was my learning experience of what not to do with trauma and healing, Willoughby Tucker has been my experience of what not to do in love.' In the real world, bleak as it is, Anhedönia is determined to live well. Smiling between two long curtains of mousey brown hair, she reels off a list of reasons to get up in the morning: 'A great breakfast, a beautiful sunrise, paying for someone's groceries if they can't.' And then there is love – in her view the most 'high-risk, high-reward' feeling in the world. A few days before we speak, she 'hard launched' her new relationship, sharing a video of her new boyfriend lifting her up on a truck parked on a dirt road, and kissing her. 'Ethel Cain lived and died loving and praying to be loved back,' Anhedönia says. 'The entire Preacher's trilogy is centred around love. Love lost, love gained, love perverted, love stolen. Love is everything to us. It doesn't matter what you love or who you love, but that you love something – and that love is what propels you forward every day. For better or worse, I think that is a beautiful thing.' Willoughby Tucker, I'll Always Love You is released on 8 August.

Cain consumed with grief in Emmerdale as he devastates Moira with cruel move

Metro

4 days ago

Metro

Cain consumed with grief in Emmerdale as he devastates Moira with cruel move

Cain Dingle (Jeff Hordley) hurt Moira Dingle (Natalie J Robb) in tonight's episode of Emmerdale, following a major development about Nate Robinson's (Jurell Carter) killer. Yesterday, DS Walsh told Cain and Tracy Shankley (Amy Walsh) that Owen Michaels (Simon Haines) had confessed to killing Nate. Understandably, the news knocked them both. Not only did they have to try and deal with the fact Nate's murderer had been found, but they also had to try and come to terms with the fact a complete stranger was responsible for his death. We know of course, that none of this is true. Last Friday, John Sugden (Oliver Farnworth) found Owen unconscious in his house. With knowledge that Cain and Tracy were desperate for closure, John left Owen to die and then wrote a note on his laptop, saying that he killed Nate. He believed that it would help Cain and Tracy with moving forward – but it just made things even worse. At Butlers Farm, Moira found Cain at the table. It was early morning, but Cain had been sat there for ages after struggling to sleep. Playing on his mind was the fact he will now never get a chance to confront Owen about Nate's murder. Moira attempted to make Cain feel better by reminding him that she knows exactly what it's like to lose a child. Unfortunately, a grieving Cain told Moira that the aftermath of Holly Barton's death isn't the same as Nate's, because she 'did that to herself'. Ouch. Cain spent the day consumed with negative emotion over the lack of closure regarding Nate. As John's guilt increased, Cain attempted to learn more about the sort of person Owen was from Liam Cavanagh (Jonny McPherson). Liam had been visiting Owen as his doctor, but refused to tell Cain anything that would breach patient confidentiality. This left Cain incredibly annoyed and it led to him grabbing his best friend. Want to be the first to hear shocking EastEnders spoilers? Who's leaving Coronation Street? The latest gossip from Emmerdale? Join 10,000 soaps fans on Metro's WhatsApp Soaps community and get access to spoiler galleries, must-watch videos, and exclusive interviews. Simply click on this link, select 'Join Chat' and you're in! Don't forget to turn on notifications so you can see when we've just dropped the latest spoilers! Sent away from the pub, Cain took himself off for a walk to clear his head. He ended up back at Butlers Farm where he found Moira feeding some cows. More Trending Cain apologised to Moira and they hugged, with Moira being understanding of the situation Cain is currently in. As he left, Robert Sugden (Ryan Hawley) arrived. Topic of conversation turned to Owen and when Moira mentioned him planting Nate's phone in Frankie's playhouse, Robert was astounded. He found it incredibly odd that Owen would risk getting caught by heading to the place Nate lived – and will soon get very close indeed to the truth about Nate. View More » MORE: Emmerdale star Natalie J Robb reveals why she has never married after her 'world shattered' MORE: All 24 Emmerdale pictures for next week confirm character returns and violence MORE: Why is Emmerdale not on tonight? Yet more scheduling chaos explained

Singer Ethel Cain admits she is 'not proud' of disturbing posts after backlash

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‘I've long struggled with my identity in pop': Ethel Cain on fandom, first loves, and being inspired by David Lynch

‘I've long struggled with my identity in pop': Ethel Cain on fandom, first loves, and being inspired by David Lynch

Cain consumed with grief in Emmerdale as he devastates Moira with cruel move

Singer Ethel Cain admits she is 'not proud' of disturbing posts after backlash

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‘I've long struggled with my identity in pop': Ethel Cain on fandom, first loves, and being inspired by David Lynch

‘I've long struggled with my identity in pop': Ethel Cain on fandom, first loves, and being inspired by David Lynch

Cain consumed with grief in Emmerdale as he devastates Moira with cruel move

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