Album Review: Ethel Cain - 'Willoughby Tucker, I'll Always Love You'
Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You by Ethel Cain - A record about the inevitability of loss that never stops clinging to beauty, even when painful.
Hayden Silas Anhedönia returns with Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You, a prequel to her 2022 debut Preacher’s Daughter and the end of her artistic chapter as Ethel Cain.
The record delves deeper into the Southern Gothic world she has been carefully constructing since her earliest releases. It follows the love story between Ethel and Willoughby Tucker, a recurring character in her songs, and her fascination with this doomed romance, small-town decay, and themes such as sexual abuse, drugs, and deeply personal religious trauma.
Cain has always blurred the line between character study and autobiography, and here she gives voice to Willoughby Tucker, a man who previously passed into the background of her story, now brought into focus. Across its 74-minute run, the album paints a picture, part-confessional, part-fever dream, through lyrics, long instrumental passages, and a sonic palette that fuses slowcore with shoegaze, and a clearly Lynchian-inspired ambience.
If Preacher’s Daughter was a road trip toward death and tragedy, Willoughby Tucker feels like the haunted prelude, the days and nights when the air was still heavy with possibility and uncertainty. Cain uses the record’s structure to let the story unfold gradually. The opening track, “Janie,” cuts straight to the bone with the lyrics, “She was my girl first / I know you love her / But she was my girl first,” a line that manages to sound both accusatory and filled with grief. It sets the emotional tone for what follows: a chronicle of love tangled in rivalry, obsession, and fear. It makes you feel that Ethel’s story was doomed from the start.
Songs like “Nettles” turn moments of mortality into nightmare scenarios, the image of a hospital bed at night and the fear of losing someone you love: “The doctors gave you until the end of the night / But not till daylight”. This is a record where the personal bleeds into the mythic, and where myth feels frighteningly personal. This song is probably the most representative of the love story she’s trying to tell us, it is powerful, heartbreaking and simply beautiful.
Sonically, she is leaning into atmosphere more heavily than before. Similarly to her EP Perverts, released earlier this year. She has cited her admiration for Angelo Badalamenti’s Twin Peaks score, and even used synths from the show in tracks like “Nettles”. The result is reminiscent of power lines over an empty field, guitar lines dissolved into reverb-soaked fog, and percussion that emerges only to sink back into the mix like a heartbeat fading under water. On the instrumental “Willoughby’s Theme”, the layering is deliberate, Cain said she “wanted to try and sonically capture the nauseating, dizzying fear and rush of falling in love and realizing that no matter what happens inside it, you will be fundamentally changed by it in the end”. Each chord progression and sound draws the listener further into the album’s cinematic mood.
But as intentional as the interludes and instrumental passages can be, they can drag at times making the story foggy and lost in the ambiance. Especially for an album so deeply ingrained in its own story, it tends to prioritize tone over plot.
Nevertheless, tracks such as “Fuck Me Eyes”, a standout track with a shimmering 80s synth pop surface, shake things up. It’s the most dynamic moment on the album, yet one of the most tragic. It follows Ethel’s obsession with a high school girl who “goes to church straight from the clubs” and “they say she looks just like her mama before the drugs”. The track takes an even darker path with the lyrics “Nowhere to go, she's just along for the ride / She's scared of nothing but the passenger's side / Of some old man's truck in the dark parking lot / She's just tryna feel good right now”, foreshadowing Ethel’s ultimate end.
“Dust Bowl” provides one of the record’s more powerful and romantic moments, its sludgy tempo scoring a lyric about fixation and ruin: “Pretty boy/ Consumed by death / With the holes in his sneakers / And his eyes all over me, over me”.
Cain sings as if she’s preserving a photograph of Willoughby she knows will eventually burn, but for now, it's hers. It’s romantic, tragic, and full of intensity, a dramatic representation of teenage love.
Much of the record’s second half builds toward the magnificent closer “Waco, Texas,” a 15-minute epic that brings all of the album’s themes into a final, full circle refrain: “Love is not enough in this world / But I still believe in Nebraska dreaming”. Referencing “A House in Nebraska” from her debut. It’s a line that captures her entire artistic journey as Ethel Cain, hope and resignation at the same time, romance and ruin bound together as if they were meant to be. The song builds into a storm before going into near-silence with only a mellow piano melody in the background, leaving the listener suspended in that liminal space Cain has been mapping since her earliest EPs, and finally laying Ethel to rest.
What makes Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You so affecting is how it reframes familiar elements from her past work, including the biblical overtones, the decaying Americana, and the obsessive relationships, but with a tighter narrative focus and an even more immersive sound design. The production is denser but somehow more spacious, allowing her vocals to drift in and out of the frame like a ghost. This is not an album designed for casual listening. Its slow tempos, long runtimes, and ambient interludes demand your time and attention, but promise an equally rewarding and heartbreaking experience.
In an age where playlists and social media encourage skipping and shuffling, Cain insists on total immersion, and her commitment to that vision is part of what makes her work so honest and unique. Even with the critiques, there's bravery in refusing to dilute her sound and letting songs stretch until they feel lived in, allowing quiet to carry as much weight as sound.
As a prequel, Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You further enriches the tragic story of the Preacher’s Daughter, adding depth to characters and situations only hinted at before. But as its own work of art, it’s a record about the inevitability of loss that never stops clinging to beauty, even when painful. It puts Anhedönia above all of her peers in terms of storytelling and artistic vision, and perfectly ends the Ethel Cain chapter before embarking on the next.
Words by Marcos Sanoja
