Ethel Cain, Raised In A Bubble, Stays Isolated For Her Art

Ethel Cain, Raised In A Bubble, Stays Isolated For Her Art




By Danielle Chelosky


Listening to Ethel Cain’s songs can feel imminent and intense, like being struck with a revelation or watching a massive hurricane roll in. There’s a sense that nothing will be the same subsequently. Hayden Silas Anhedönia — the unconventional artist who brings nation twang and also a sharp, emo-rap edge to the indie-pop project — has a knack for stretching ephemeral moments of awe into large sensory experiences. She takes that to the next level with Preacher’s Daughter, which despite being her debut full-length, can’t be described as anything although her opus. Over a hour long, it is as cinematic and visceral as a horror film. The album focuses on a teenage runaway, an idea Anhedönia compares to Thelma & Louise because it has a “all-American tale vibe with some fables and proverbs along the way,” she says over Zoom about a month before the release.


Anhedönia’s art is a complex reckoning. The 24-year-old grew up in a religious family member in Florida. Her dad was a deacon, and she and her siblings were homeschooled. She came out as gay at age 12, left to live on her own immediately after turning 18, and started to accept her identity as a transgender woman around 20. The music she started making throughout this period of self-discovery turned her alienation into power. Wicca Phase Springs Eternal — the emo-rap project of Adam McIlwee, who founded the music collective Goth Boi Clique that nurtured Lil Tracy and the late icon Lil Peep — stumbled upon her work and was immediately pulled in.


“I saw Ethel’s name on a Nicole Dollangager flyer in 2019 and determined to listen to her music, probably because I thought she had a good name,” McIlwee shares by way of the email. “I couldn’t believe how mature of an artist she seemed at such an early stage in her career — her voice and lyrics were already very good, and her branding and aesthetic already seemed to be completely formed, which is so rare for an artist with only a handful of songs.”


He introduced her to fellow emo-rap prodigy Lil Aaron, who runs the label Hazheart Records, and he helped her out with releasing the music to a new audience. Since then, she has released two EPs, 2019’s Golden Age and last year’s Inbred. Reverberating, spectral sounds and poetic lyricism imbued the collections with hypnotic atmospheres. Both featured two collaborators: Inbred invited Wicca Phase onto the sprawling eight-minute track “God’s Country” and Lil Aaron on the coruscating ballad “Michelle Pfeiffer.” Immediately after being laid off from her job at a nail salon due to financial hardships caused by the pandemic, Anhedönia signed a record deal in August 2020 with Prescription Songs.


In the midst of all this, Anhedönia was building Preacher’s Daughter, which features no one although herself. “I began working on it When I was like 19,” she says. “It seems like forever ago, although I would just sort of work on it here and there.” It’s set in 1991, any time “my mom was the same age that I am now,” she explains. “I really wanted to explore ’90s nostalgia with her and work my back up by means of the decades for the future albums as we go back up the family member tree.” This album is a piece of a trilogy that follows three generations of girls, however chronologically it’s not the opening — it’s the last, centering on the youngest of the bunch. “I’ve routinely had a love for the ’90s although I was barely present for it. All of the TVs in my residence are old box TVs. I only watch VHS tapes and then some DVDs. I think I’m just permanently stuck in the past because childhood is, you know, the purest time of your life.”


Helen Kirbo
“I remember being a kid and being very sheltered, very Christian, very closed off to the outdoor world. I remember I would go to my grandparents’ residence and visualize a crime show on TV or I would visualize a scandalous movie poster on the side of the Movie Gallery,” she says. “We would drive through downtown and I remember those little glimpses into the real world through this very sheltered bubble that I was in. They were life-changing.” The Ethel Cain character is reclusive. Though she uses social media, her posts are cryptic and brief, never giving also much of herself away. She refuses to move to a city, or really anywhere behind the rural South; as we Zoom, she sits in her Alabama residence, which she describes as “completely isolated.” Yet she still fantasizes about disappearing even more: “I really look forward to making a residence somewhere out in the middle of nowhere, and I may not even put Wi-Fi in it,” she contemplates aloud.


This elusiveness heightens the impact of her music, lending the songs the texture of a prophecy.  It brings to mind the resonance of Neutral Milk Hotel’s 1998 masterwork In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, which was more and more cult-followed and adored as bandleader Jeff Mangum, who’s also a masterful storyteller, went into hiding subsequently. She is unafraid to carve out space in music for herself and go all in with what she creates. It isn’t the sort of music that’s easy to forget. It lingers and haunts like a ghost. The sound is often brooding and hallucinogenic; some days it’s flat-out scary, with bone-chilling instrumentals that sound like floating by way of the ether untethered, up until Anhedönia’s shimmering vocals come back in as a guiding force. Other times, like in “Sun Bleached Flies” or “American Teenager,” a blinding brightness soars by means of the songs among celebratory synths and bouncy rhythms. Epiphanies flicker within vivid scenes and unbridled emotions without consideration of the sonic palette.


In grappling with her Southern upbringing, she doesn’t hesitate to dig into the lows. Illegal substances, violence, and death animate her lyrics, though not without criticism. “I’ve been accused of being a white nationalist, racist, Republican, right-winger, redneck, the complete slew of it,” she says. Yet she understands her vision is on the correct track. “You have a lot of backward-thinking, ignorant people in the South, that’s very true,” she admits. “But you also have some of the most diverse cultures that don't get any spotlight. I’m not attempting to glorify the racist, violent characteristic of the South that it’s known for. I'd like to tell the tales of people who are suffering from that, because there really are a lot of people here who don’t agree with that and don’t believe in that and also you never really hear about them.” She aims to dive into the “dark side of patriotism,” and the power that the American dream holds over people despite the fact that it will probably “do nothing yet get you killed, leave a hole in your family members, and put cash in [the government’s] pocket,” she says.


Nevertheless the misunderstanding and misconstruing of her art are inevitable, only contributing to her drive to get further off the grid. She’s continuing to grow, cultivating a devoted fanbase — or, more accurately speaking, stanbase — on Twitter. She is on the aforementioned Prescription Songs, the major label founded by disgraced producer Dr. Luke, about which she has said: “I am totally oblivious to most things in the industry [...] All I can mention is I reside in my bubble and do my work.” Sacrifice was needed to bring Preacher’s Daughter to life, though, judging by the music, it’s surprising that it wasn’t something more intense and ritualistic like human sacrifice. Nevertheless it has all been paying off.


“Everything has its pros and cons,” she expounds. “I’m very neurotic about my vision. I really want it to be as close to what I visualize in my head as possible. Otherwise, you know, why bother trying? I’m gonna go for what my original vision was, and also a lot of times that requires a lot of cash. And the only way to prepare a lot of cash as an artist is to be successful. So I just bit that bullet and was like, it’s going to be hard and it’s going to be stressful. However it’s all for the art.”









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