Is This the End of Ethel Cain?

When Hayden Anhedönia gets restless, which she often does, she drives around Tallahassee in her banged-up Chevy Silverado — past antebellum-era mansions and lush canopy roads, luxury dorms and Baptist churches. On a sunny June afternoon, she’s parked outside Bradley’s Country Store, a family-owned general store 30 minutes northeast of downtown. It’s her favorite place to think. The surrounding oak trees appear dust-coated with gray Spanish moss tangled in their branches. A pond shimmers in the distance. The 27-year-old singer-songwriter is drinking a peach soda at a picnic table, wearing a tube top, sweatshorts that read “hardcore,” and cowboy boots. Her skin is a maze of tattoos. Etched on the middle of her throat, just below a cross, is the word please.

Until last year, Anhedönia had been living in remote towns across America, which she found while scrolling for “old grandma houses” on Zillow. She returned to Tallahassee in the summer to commune with an old friend named Ethel Cain. “I have to just be quiet and let her tell me,” she says. “It’s like Ethel is a ghost forgotten by time who said, ‘Will you tell my story?’”

Ethel’s name might not register to locals — neither the conspiracy-addicted yogi nor the retired nurse still clucking over Benghazi I met that morning said they’d heard of her — but she’s somewhat legendary to young alternative-pop-music fans. She’s Anhedönia’s doomed alter ego, a God-fearing daughter of the rural American South. (Her devotees call themselves the Daughters of Cain.) Anhedönia had begun imagining Ethel around 2018 while working 70-hour weeks as a nail tech in Tallahassee and developing her sound as a DIY musician. “I’ve always been obsessed with the southern gothic, and I loved the idea of a scary matronly figure living in an old farmhouse on the hill,” she says. One day, she put on an old Gunne Sax prairie dress from Etsy, and the character came to life. Having fled her own Evangelical upbringing, Anhedönia mapped out a punishing narrative universe centered on three generations of women raised within the Baptist church. “Ethel is a way to express the things that have happened to me and things I’ve been afraid of happening to me — a fear of being a woman in this world,” she explains.

Anhedönia introduces Ethel’s backstory on her 2022 debut album, Preacher’s Daughter, a sprawling 75-minute odyssey through arena rock, ambient pop, country, and doom metal that starts with sexual trauma and ends in murder. It’s set in 1991, ten years after Joseph Cain, the town preacher, died in a fire. His daughter, Ethel, is living in his shadow with her mother (Vera) and grandmother (also Ethel). She’s also weeping over her high-school love, Willoughby Tucker, whom she would meet at an abandoned house on the edge of their Alabama town. Yearning for freedom, Ethel sets out on the road only to be kidnapped, sold into prostitution, and cannibalized by a lover.

Ethel is a way to express the things that have happened to me and things I’ve been afraid of happening to me — a fear of being a woman in this world.

Preacher’s Daughter, a sort of folklore for David Lynch and true-crime aficionados, isn’t the album you’d expect to break through to the mainstream, but it did. Former president Barack Obama named “American Teenager,” a heartland-rock anthem exposing the vacancy of the American Dream, one of his favorite songs of 2022. (“Did not have a former president including my anti-war, anti-patriotism fake pop song on his year end list on my 2022 bingo,” Anhedönia responded on X.) Countless Reddit threads and TikTok trends followed, including memes of Kim Kardashian dressed like a Pilgrim set to the druggy piano track “A House in Nebraska.” Soon Anhedönia was touring the globe, playing Coachella, and fronting campaigns for fashion houses like Miu Miu and Givenchy, though she says she still primarily buys clothes from Walmart.

A central theme of Anhedönia’s music as Ethel Cain is how the supposedly greatest country in the world is so hostile to its own people. As a public figure, she’s a fierce critic of the American Establishment, a kind of leftist antithesis of the Morgan Wallens of the music industry. “As an artist, I think you have a responsibility to instill a sense of selflessness and justice in people,” she says. “I never want people to think, Oh, I just listened to her for the music.” She excoriated the Biden administration on Instagram for approving $1 billion in arms sales to Israel (“We need to bring back assassinations”), released a song in tribute to Palestine, and called America a “loveless, disrespectful nation” on Tumblr after Donald Trump’s 2024 election.

Fans have looked to her for the moral clarity lacking in their elected representatives. At the beginning of this year, she drew the ire of Fox News for posting #KillMoreCEOs on Instagram Stories in response to the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. She refused to back down: “The healthcare system has fucked each and every member of my family in a different way at one point or another, as is the case with pretty much every family in this scorched earth nation,” she wrote in a subsequent Tumblr essay. Weeks later, she became the first openly trans artist with an album on Billboard’s top ten.

On August 8, Anhedönia will release Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You, the second installment in the Ethel Cain trilogy and Preacher’s Daughter’s prequel. Ahead of that, she has been roaming around town, grappling with her complicated history in this place. Tallahassee is where she left home at 18, tried out music and reactionary edgelordism, started medically transitioning, and changed her name to Anhedönia (the inability to experience pleasure). It is where she has returned, more famous than ever, to a loving community of family and friends and where, she says, the hospital she was born in has been denying her hormone medication. “I’ve always described North Florida as feeling like there’s a Hellmouth nearby,” she says as it starts to drizzle and we walk over to a nearby cabin for cover. “It’s so beautiful, but sometimes it feels really dark.”

Anhedönia grew up the eldest of four about an hour away from here in the roughly 7,000-person town of Perry, Florida. It was a “lawless place … where, out of desperation, when you get bored of shooting up, you go shoot up your high school,” she once told Pitchfork, explaining a line from her song “Head in the Wall.” Her father was a truck driver and deacon; her mother was a part-time clerk who sang with her in the church. Homeschooled from a young age, Anhedönia was isolated and limited to Christian media. “I had really no indication of the outside world except for maybe the TV at my grandparents’,” she says.

When she was 12, she admitted she liked boys to her mom, who sent her to religious therapy. Parents from church prohibited her from playing with their kids. “It was lonely and scary, like, Am I going to live here as the villain forever? I kind of accepted that I wouldn’t be a person until I moved out,” she says.

The internet was her escape. “Suddenly there was a whole new world of people who were queer, people who weren’t die-hard Republicans,” she says. Her parents blocked Twitter and YouTube, but her virtual-homeschool teacher had the Black Eyed Peas’ “I Gotta Feeling” embedded at the end of her email signature. “I found out how to search YouTube through that player, and I would watch horror-movie trailers all day,” Anhedönia says. To pass the time, she fantasized about being a glamorous pop star like her idol, Florence Welch of Florence and the Machine, or falling in love, something she never thought possible for a pariah like her. As graduation approached, she thought she might go to film school at Florida State University, but that never panned out: “I said, I’ll just get famous instead.”

Basking in her newfound freedom in Tallahassee, she dabbled in hard drugs, hooked up with strangers, and experimented with wailing over looped backing tracks she made with GarageBand. She had difficulty getting booked at shows. “I was quite literally making Gregorian chants,” she says. “And nobody wanted to put that on at their house.” She and her friends made do with whatever unorthodox venues they could find: “I think one of my friends just went into a sewer tunnel and did a DJ set down there.” All the while, she struggled to make sense of herself and her orientation to the world. After shaving her head in an ill-fated attempt to try to commit to life as a man, she came out as trans on Facebook on her 20th birthday. The only other trans person she knew at the time passed over his doctor’s number, and she showed up the day after Halloween, wasted, to start her medical transition.

That year, she found a dusty piano loop that would become the basis of her song “A House in Nebraska,” setting off the Ethel Cain project and creation of Preacher’s Daughter. Writing an intergenerational narrative about poverty, crises of faith, and inherited trauma opened up a more complex view of her mom, a born-again Christian. She began to wonder what it’d be like to forgive. “I didn’t want to envision a world where I didn’t have my family,” she says. The summer before she left Tallahassee, in 2020, she reached a breakthrough: “I kind of realized there is no clarity; there is no closure; none of these gruesome displays of remorse are going to do anything for me. All I can really do is say, ‘I love you, and I’m going to let go.’” She packed her bags for eastern Indiana, where she lived in a converted 19th-century church with her younger sister, Delilah, and a few friends.

I remember seeing somebody say, ‘Ethel Cain, give us a dance-pop album and we’ll listen to whatever drunk ambient bullshit you want to put out next.’

Also in 2020, through the rapper-singer Lil Aaron, she met with representatives for the Los Angeles–based label Prescription Songs. She signed with the publishing company though it is owned by the disgraced producer Dr. Luke. “I was broke,” she later told Rolling Stone. “I was literally going to the hospital because I was malnourished.” Under this contract, she released a few singles and Inbred, a 2021 EP of reverb-drenched power ballads that previewed her macabre perspective on America. “Bare naked under my nightgown / Pissing on the stove to put it out / … Sucking on the back of his leg to stay warm,” she begins the title track. Preacher’s Daughter arrived a year later along with an explosion in her audience.

Over the past few years, she has progressively vacated the internet, once her place of refuge. In 2023, she deactivated her X account, then, in sweeping Tumblr posts a year later, diagnosed how the attention economy had suffocated audiences’ capacity for serious engagement with art. Fans would parrot TikTok bons mots to her on the street and at shows; she felt like a meme, not a musician. “I remember seeing somebody say, ‘Ethel Cain, give us a dance-pop album and we’ll listen to whatever drunk ambient bullshit you want to put out next,’” she tells me. Feeling smothered by Ethel Cain’s story, she released the willfully disorienting and challenging drone project, Perverts, in January. “It was, at its core, a passion project, but I can’t lie and say that I wasn’t also conscious of the fact that it was going to shake up my following,” she says.

Right now, Anhedönia makes enough money as Ethel Cain to financially support herself and friends helping the project. She lives modestly — she has never paid more than $1,000 in rent, she says — and claims not to care about industry metrics. “With all due respect, anybody else’s wishes do not register outside the maelstrom of my own expectations,” she says.

Inside the home Anhedönia shares with two roommates, dried Spanish moss dangles from the living-room ceiling; old scythes hang from a quilt-covered wall. The home had belonged to a hoarder and was crawling with roaches when she found it, she tells me with a glimmer of pride. She forced her landlord to hire cleaners and then found crime-scene specialists to sanitize the place one more time: “They’re like, ‘We clean up dead bodies,’ and I’m like, ‘Perfect.’” A would-be-decorative deer carcass she found on the road remains in her Silverado parked out front. She’d planned on throwing it to the ants to clean, she says, but it broke rattling in the trunk.

She wants to stay in Florida, near her loved ones, particularly as they endure Governor Ron DeSantis’s administration. None of her trans friends can get official access to hormone medication; her aging family members are facing mounting health-care costs. “One of the biggest gripes I’ve always had with my own fans is romanticizing the southern-gothic aspect of my work while disrespecting the legacy of the people swallowed by the politics of the South,” Anhedönia says. But her trolls are worse: Over the years, they have doxed her family, hacked her accounts, and deadnamed her in attempts at public humiliation. Her visibility as an anti-Trump dissenter and unapologetic supporter of Palestine has attracted more negative attention.

In person, she doesn’t betray any bitterness about this, speaking with calm conviction about her moral duties as an individual and an artist. But she’s suspicious of fans who put her on a pedestal for her advocacy, acting as though social justice is just a matter of backing the right celebrity: “You know, there’s a lot of comments of ‘Oh, I knew she was on the right side of history. That’s why I stan her, yadda yadda yadda.’ I’m like, That’s good, but everyone can do their small bit of activism. Please don’t just think that this is something you can use to justify being a fan of mine.”

She has said indefensible things before. Some of them come to light a month after we meet. When she was 19, Anhedönia made Tumblr and Curious Cat posts that used the N-word and joked that the U.S. should “build that wall!” Fans and trolls dug up the posts and circulated them on the r/Ethelcain sub-Reddit. Within days, she released a more than 2,000-word Google-doc statement explaining that as a teen, she had habituated herself to provocation, first becoming a “social justice warrior” to rebel against her hostile conservative upbringing, then disavowing this “‘cringe SJW’ behavior” and seeking new sources of reaction. “I would have said (and usually did say) anything, about anyone, to gain attention and ultimately just make my friends laugh,” she wrote.

But so-called fans had also dredged up a sketch of a chained-up boy she drew at 19, accusing her of child pornography, and a photo of her topless on the Fourth of July with a friend’s dog, among other things — which she identified in her statement as part of a targeted smear campaign, the result of intensive digging by individuals who “do not care who else is hurt by witnessing this media as long as I am ultimately hurt the worst in the end.” Tabloids like People picked up the controversy. Later, Anhedönia talks to me further about it over the phone. “There were so many layers coming from many different places, and I just thought I needed to be as intentional with my words as possible and then shut the hell up,” she says. She doesn’t make excuses for her racist posts: “It was shameful to assume my actions didn’t have any weight, as if the world was just some fictional stage — but I like to think it has no bearing on where I am at in the world today.”

Last December, Anhedönia was picking up snacks at a nearby truck stop when a trucker named Austin approached her. A preacher’s son who lives in Mississippi, he’d been serendipitously passing through Florida. He had listened to Preacher’s Daughter and had a vague sense the woman standing in front of him might be Ethel Cain. Prior to Austin, Anhedönia had been too anxious and preoccupied with work to commit to relationships. But they bonded over loving the experimental ambient musician Grouper. “Sometimes I am not convinced the CIA didn’t send him,” she says. “He’s too perfect.”

Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You is a slow, magisterial album about the uncertainties of a blossoming relationship and the challenges of loving when the weight of the world comes to bear. Ethel beholds all that she’s losing: the drive-in theater where Willoughby would feel her up, his brown eyes and ratty sneakers, the stale air of the bedroom where they endure so many sleepless nights. Half of it is composed of sonorous instrumental passages, as if the grief is so profound words could never suffice. Willoughby is sick, reeling from an abusive father, a near-fatal accident at the factory, and other traumas that make his disappearance from her all but inevitable. “How much of a cruel year can you call my fault?” she sings on the closing track, “Waco, Texas.” “I’ve been picking names for our children / You’ve been wondering how you’re gonna feed them / Love is not enough in this world.”

A lot of these country boys are more open-minded than you think.

Anhedönia finished Willoughby almost immediately after making her relationship official with Austin. “It’s about, Is it possible to find love in this place with a kind of person that you want to fall in love with?” she says. “But a lot of these country boys are more open-minded than you think.”

After Willoughby, Anhedönia will say good-bye to Ethel Cain. She has completed her record deal and will go independent for her next album, following a new character — Ethel’s mother, Vera — in a new setting and time period. “It’s been seven long years of my life, which is a bittersweet closing, but now I can move forward to a new chapter,” she says. But she’ll stick around Tallahassee, looking for undiscovered creeks and dirt roads. “What’s comforting to me is I’ll always just be here with my friends,” she says. “And if ever people get tired of hearing about Ethel Cain, you know what? I will renew that nail license, and I will clean toenails until the day that I die.”