Ethel Cain New Release

Ethel Cain: Portrait of A Lady On Fire

Januarry 12, 2022 | By Michelle Hyun Kim

One night in 2018, Hayden Silas Anhedönia found herself possessed by a woman named Ethel Cain. As the story goes—charted chronologically across the singer-songwriter’s debut album Preacher’s Daughter— Cain escapes the strictures of her religious upbringing only to fall into a doomed romance. The listener is then drawn into her downward spiral of kidnapping, drug addiction, prostitution, and eventually Cain’s murder and cannibalization at the hands of her lover (like any good pop album, then).

The parallels between Anhedönia and her alter ego begin with the former’s upbringing in a tight-knit Southern Baptist community in the Florida panhandle, where she was homeschooled by her father, a deacon. On Preacher’s Daughter, we meet Cain for the first time in 1991, a decade after the death of her own father, the town preacher. From then on, their paths diverge— Anhedönia and her dad are both very much alive, let it be known—but given the heady, horrifying trajectory of her protagonist, where does Cain begin and Anhedönia end? “We inhabit the same space, at least visually, but I’m very different from her,” Anhedönia says, before deadpanning: “I love to laugh, and Ethel’s dead.” The ghost of Cain still lingers, though. When we speak, Anhedönia is is preparing to take her cult hit of an album out on the road. She’s also developing a multimedia cycle around the character of Cain and her family, which will include a book and a film.

“I’ve been sitting with this person for four years writing this record, and I’m kind of in a middle ground now.”

(For the next record, Anhedönia is planning to climb one link further up the family tree and tell the story of Cain’s mother.)

Cain might be dead, but her fate—and that of her ancestry—now feels inextricably linked with Anhedönia’s own. Growing up in a deeply religious, conservative family, Anhedönia always felt like an outsider. At 16, she came out to her mother as gay, sending shock waves through their town. She found catharsis for her inner turmoil in Christian choirs and high school theater programs—“I was always singing as a kid,” she remembers,

“Preacher’s Daughter“ Ethel Cain’s Debut Album Cover

“I was really annoying”—and began honing her abilities as a musician after decamping to Tallahassee, Florida. There, she experimented with hard drugs and even harder electronic music before experiencing an epiphany of sorts and coming out as trans. She realized that it was time to break away and stake her own place in the world. “I knew then that I wanted to be an artist of some kind.”