Willoughby Tucker, I Will Always Love You Is a Calm, Unprovocative Addition to Ethel Cain’s Lore

But Anhedönia has been through a lot. After Preacher’s Daughter blew up, she acquired a fanbase full of queer fans and became a political livewire targeted by conservatives. Besides her vocal support of Palestine, she made Fox News headlines when she posted #KillMoreCEOs after the murder of United HealthCare CEO Brian Thompson. In July, a campaign against Anhedönia dredged up past problematic comments (that she has since freely admitted to) while also including more extreme claims that conflated the truth with worse obscenities. The Floridian wrote a 2,000-word Google doc response taking accountability and clearing up falsehoods in an unusually thorough rebuttal of cancel culture. And yet, while Anhedönia herself is very of her time, her music takes many steps back from the present, crafting Ethel Cain’s thorny story in the backwoods and small towns of the mythologized Deep South.

Willoughby Tucker further’s the mythology, as his presence lingers in the sonics of a heartbeat monitor in “Radio Towers.” As a character in the Cain universe, he is as sprawling and translucent as the druggy ambience, melancholy piano, and pedal steel that envelops him. Whereas Isaiah was a clear antagonist disguised as a love interest (and beacon of freedom) on Preacher’s Daugher, Tucker is his antithesis—more concept than person, and the album tells you more about Cain than about him, allowing him to become a conduit for her romantic and personal insecurities. In pop music, perfect characterization isn’t necessarily neither here nor there. However, when the music itself can sound so limp and aimless, despite its immersiveness, the lack of an obvious throughline leaves a record like Willoughby Tucker, I Will Always Love You vague and unclarified without repeat listens.

Cain has never been one to cut herself short. Essential parts on Willoughby Tucker boast a runtime of anywhere from seven to 15 minutes. Lead single “Nettles” is eight minutes long, and the album is backended with its two biggest efforts, “Tempest” and “Waco, Texas.” “Tempest” is grand and elegant, but it can leave one unfulfilled with each repeating “forever.” The climax of Willoughby’s story doesn’t ever happen, either. But, in the age of TikTok-length attention spans, Cain’s persistent use of epic, near-10-minute songs as a working pop-adjascent artist today is admirable, even if there isn’t always a successful payoff. But unlike the crunchy dread of Perverts, the ambience offered on Willoughby Tucker is decidedly not confrontational. “Willoughby’s Theme” and “Willoughby’s Interlude,” two key ambient pieces, have much more in common with Preacher’s Daughter’s instrumentals. “August Underground” and “Televangelism” worked three years ago because they were short and unobtrusive, cushioning the climax and denouement in a good way. The three ambient tracks on Willoughby Tucker are tasked with heavy lifting in a manner akin to “A House in Nebraska” and “Ptolemaea.”

The excellent, jealousy anthem “Fuck Me Eyes” (a nod to Kim Carnes’ “Bette Davis Eyes”) is built around a synth riff recalling Chromatics’ “Shadow,” as intoxicating electronics sweep over you with awe. High school envy has never sounded so rapturous. “A Knock at the Door,” with its plucked acoustic guitar and lo-fi vocals, is reminiscent of Nicole Dollanganger’s work, who is very much a progenitor of Ethel Cain’s style of music. (The two artists share a collaborator in Matthew Tomasi, who contributed significantly to Willoughby Tucker.) Procuring the same synth Angelo Badalementi used on the Twin Peaks theme, “Nettles” twinges while a decaying Americana landscape collapses into each verse, contrasting with “Tempest” and “Dust Bowl”’s heavy lean into slowcore. “Nettles” stands out on the album by sprawling idyllically without a real sign of discomfort or stress, save for the vague descriptions of Willoughby’s accident and his hospital room. It’s the closest Cain has ever gotten to a truly peaceful pop song. In the strange, uncomfortable, and violent pocket of rural America, “Nettles” floats by weightlessly even without the context of a line like “a piece of shrapnel flew up and slowed that part of you.”

But only during “Dust Bowl,” do we finally get a legible picture of Willoughby Tucker. He’s a “blood stained blond with holes in his sneakers” and, just like Isaiah, he is caught in a love affair described in violent terms. Of course, this time, the violence—the factory explosion—is outside of both Cain’s and Tucker’s control. When she sings, “Grew up hard, fell off harder / Cooking our brains smoking that shit your daddy smoked in Vietnam,” and the beat drops, you feel the weight of generational trauma that keeps families trapped in vicious cycles of poverty. It hits like a truck.

Throughout Willoughby Tucker, I Will Always Love You, Ethel Cain longs for freedom—for an escape from her oppressive small town—and the album captures a feeling of confinement that high-school life can engender when you’re not living honestly. When everything outside of your small town feels like a mystery, Cain’s large stretches of ambience accurately summarize the great, wide, and uncertain world. But, for as interesting a person as Hayden Anhedönia can be and as dramatic a character Ethel Cain so often is, Willoughby Tucker markedly lacks the spark of excitement that might catalyze a zeitgeist. The most shocking thing about this album, especially after hearing Perverts earlier this year, is how unprovocative the album is. But the Ethel Cain project isn’t necessarily meant to be solely agitative. There is a calmer side that lays the foundation for everything that comes before and will come after. Willoughby Tucker, I Will Always Love You is just world-building, at the end of the day—a necessary bridge between ages, places, and selves.