Ethel Cain: Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You review – a dark, Lynchian coming-of-age story – UK Times

The past is alive and fraught on Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You, the new album by Ethel Cain. Over the course of 10 long, disarmingly personal tracks, the 27-year-old American singer-songwriter – real name Hayden Anhedonia – plunges into the dark psychology of small-town adolescence with unsparing verve.

Willoughby Tucker is framed as Anhedonia’s second studio album – the intoxicatingly sparse Perverts, released earlier this year, is considered a separate project – and a “prequel” to Anhedonia’s 2022 breakthrough, Preacher’s Daughter.

Fixating on teenagedom can be a hazard for ascendent twentysomething artists – it comes across as either a cynical pandering to a young fanbase, or a sort of arrested development, a refusal to grapple with the more complex truths of adulthood. Willoughby Tucker avoids this by leaning full-tilt into the past’s inky unpleasantness: it’s a slice of down-home Americana filtered through the disorienting sensibility of David Lynch. (Anhedonia has spoken about obsessively watching Twin Peaks throughout the making of the album, and Angelo Badalamenti’s iconic synth soundscape has imprinted itself here.) “Hold me, smell of mildew/ I wanna die in this room,” sings Anhedonia, in the first lines of the album’s opening track, “Janie”, a slow, elegiac number with shades of Phoebe Bridgers.

“F*** Me Eyes”, the album’s second single and its standout song, is a churning indie rock number inspired by Kim Carnes’s “Bette Davis Eyes”. Patient, off-beat synths echo the memorable hook from “A Real Hero” by College & Electric Youth, while Anhedonia’s lyrics are self-effacing, colloquial and humane. “Three years undefeated as Miss Holiday Inn/ Posted outside the liquor store ’cause she’s too young to get in,” she sings. “They ask her why she talks so loud/ What you do with all that mouth?/ Boy, if you’re not scared of Jesus/ F*** around and come find out.”

“Nettles” is another triumph, an aching, tragic love song set to a more folky sound. At eight minutes long, it flies by, transportive and affecting, breaking into a quicker swing around the halfway mark. It also provides an excellent showcase for Anhedonia’s incredible, and mutable, singing voice. On “Nettles”, it’s breathy and harmonious; elsewhere, it’s sharp and acrobatic – though always ineffably sad.

Willoughby Tucker is an album of length and indulgence: “Nettles” is far from the longest number (that honour belongs to album closer “Waco, Texas”, a sweeping odyssey of a love song, running some 15 minutes), while several of the tracks last for over six minutes. There are three instrumental numbers, which work perfectly well as doomy, atmospheric scene-setting. It’s an utterly cohesive record, perhaps to a fault; the individual parts end up consumed by the whole. If you vibe with it, though, Anhedonia has made an album that has real depths to explore – it’s just a matter of finding the right frequency.