Content warning: mentions of graphic violence (Including cannibalism) and profanity.
On October 9, 2025 at 6 PM in our reading room, the CPM is hosting our first event of the semester. It’s a listening party for Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You, which is the second studio album by Ethel Cain. If you’re not familiar with her work, Ethel Cain is a character portrayed by Florida singer-songwriter and occasional provocateur Hayden Anhedonia in her recordings and is also the protagonist of a multi-generational Southern Gothic family saga of love, murder, organized religion, and cannibalism. When talking about the fictional character in the songs, I’ll use Cain, and when talking about the creator/real person behind the character, I’ll use Anhedonia.
To get you ready for the listening party, our head librarian Logan has shared five of their personal favorite Ethel Cain tracks across her different projects in roughly chronological order. You can also listen to them (And a fun bonus live/collaborative track!) in a playlist at the end of the blog post.
1. “Crush” from Inbred (2021)
In interviews and especially in her divisive 2025 EP Perverts, Hayden Anhedonia has professed a love of drone and ambient music. But she can also write a pretty good pop song as evidenced by the omnipresent “American Teenager”, which even made former President Barack Obama’s favorite songs of 2022 list. However, my favorite Ethel Cain pop song is “Crush” from the 2021 EP Inbred that features a catchy bass line during the verses and a beautiful vocal performance from Anhedonia as she thirsts for the local bad boy/delinquent. The imagery in Hayden Anhedonia’s lyrics is Flannery O’Connor (Especially her short story “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”) meets the films of Sean Baker, but filtered through the personal lens of a young transgender woman in her twenties living in the rural/suburban South. With lines like “He looks like he works with his hands, and smells like Marlboro Reds” combined with the censored f-bombs, “Crush” epitomizes youthful desire as Hayden Anhedonia demonstrates she’s a poet and film director that just happens to have the voice of an angel.
2. “Ptolemaea” from Preacher’s Daughter (2022)
Named after a section of the Ninth Circle of Hell in Dante’s Inferno where those who betrayed their house guests are punished, “Ptolemaea” embodies evil. Featuring buzzing flies, heavy metal guitars, and ominous male spoken word vocals, this song is about Isaiah, who is the chief antagonist of the Preacher’s Daughter album storyline, drugging and capturing Ethel Cain before he murders and eats her. “Ptolemaea” is technically set on Earth, but it feels like the frozen pit of Cocytus, especially when Hayden Anhedonia gives a throat-destroying death metal scream as Cain tells her captor to “stop”. (This is why she rarely performs the song live.) Throughout the song, Isaiah objectifies Ethel Cain, calling her “sweet mourning lamb” and “white light”, but he wants to destroy that beautiful light. He also mentions a generational curse on the Daughters of Cain, which sets up the multigenerational nature of Anhedonia’s project. Although couched in language from the Bible, epic poems, or classical tragedies, “Ptolemaea” is about how frightening men can be, and how they get away with it because of the patriarchy. It’s just as scary as any horror movie you’ll watch this spooky season.
3. “Sun Bleached Flies” from Preacher’s Daughter (2022)
If “Ptolemaea” draws from Dante’s Inferno, then “Sun Bleached Flies” evokes the third canticle of his Divine Comedy: Paradiso. Seamlessly flowing out of the ambient instrumental “Televangelism”, “Sun Bleached Flies” is written from the POV of Ethel Cain gazing down from the afterlife and reflecting on her mortal life and the choices she made. Opening with solo piano and organ, this song reminds me of an old-fashioned Baptist altar call. So, it’s fitting that Hayden Anhedonia’s lyrics are sermon titles with a darker twist, like the soul-piercing “God loves you, but not enough to save you”. Cain wishes that she could have been rescued from the murderous cannibal Isaiah, but she resigns herself to her fate with the line, “If it’s meant to be, it’s meant to be” while she watches down from heavenly bliss. The trumpets and leitmotif callbacks to “A House in Nebraska” add a nice touch of archangelic nostalgia as the track builds to its crescendo before wrapping up with Anhedonia’s voice, piano, and organ showing that she can do both epic and intimate.
4. “Vacillator” from Perverts (2025)
“Vacillate” is a synonym for indecision, and the Ethel Cain track “Vacillator” doesn’t know if it wants to be a tender love/desire song or a slowcore genre exercise. Drummer Matthew Tomasi spends the beginning and end of the song exploring different sides of his kit and crafts a subdued listening environment so you can take in the yearning in Hayden Anhedonia’s vocals and lyrics. Together, Tomasi and Anhedonia explore the different facets of desire through various soundscapes, including super-minimalist percussion, drones, a sprinkle of post punk guitar playing, and whisper vocals. Parts of “Vacillator” could be an anthem like “Western Nights” or “House and Nebraska”, but it refuses to give us the satisfaction of those songs and delays gratification indefinitely while continuing to probe the darker side of Ethel Cain’s psyche.
5. “F*ck Me Eyes” from Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You (2025)
Even though I was born in the 1990s, I personally believe the 1980s were the best decade for pop songs. And “F*ck Me Eyes” is an homage to such synthpop classics as Kim Carnes’ “Bette Davis Eyes” while fleshing out Ethel Cain’s backstory. Written almost like a diary entry, this song lays out Cain’s thoughts about her classmate, Holly, who she thinks is in a relationship with her crush, the titular Willoughby Tucker. I love the contrast between its raw-like-an-open-wound lyrics and layered synthesizers and guitars. Musically, this is a classic John Hughes prom slow dance song, but it’s penned by Carrie White. “FME” is also in direct conversation with my other favorite Ethel Cain “pop” song “Crush” with Holly as the “bad girl” to the “bad boy” of that track’s male figure. Sonically, Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You mainly continues to explore the dark ambient sound of Perverts while exploring Ethel Cain’s past, but I like that Hayden Anhedonia threw a bone to us New Wave/pop-loving girlies.
-Logan Dalton
The views expressed in this blog are the staff member‘s own and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Center for Popular Music and Middle Tennessee State University.
