Ethel Cain’s American Nightmare

CW: Mentions of homophobia, sexual violence, murder and death by suicide below.

Hanging above the bed of Hayden Silas Anhedönia, better known as her gothic rocking alter-ego Ethel Cain, is a filthy American flag. She found it ripped to all hell outside an abandoned resort in Alabama, lying under several inches of muck. As she unearthed the tattered banner, she thought of her family, specifically those who had served in the military — how they would have dove to the dirt to keep it from kissing the ground. How they felt forgotten after returning from war. She thought of the people she knew growing up, who had worked their entire lives to pay for someone else’s American dream. It’s perfect, she decided. What better symbol of this country’s broken promise than its stars and stripes buried in the dust, destitute, left for dead?

The United States of America, with all its natural beauties and vexing failures, is in many ways the 24-year-old musician’s muse for her most ambitious project to date — a cinematic debut album titled Preacher’s Daughter. Over four years, Anhedönia wrote, recorded, and produced the record largely alone in her room, intending it as an American epic in the tradition of Flannery O’Connor novels or Springsteen’s Born in the U.S.A. Through 13 gritty, unsparing tracks, many stretching more than six minutes in length, she tells the tragic story of the Ethel Cain persona, who represents the darkest possibilities of the artist’s turbulent life. The result is a bountiful yet laser-focused exploration of Southern Baptism, blue-collar patriotism, and the travails of searching for freedom from these deeply American indoctrinations.

Anhedönia came of age in Perry, Florida, a town of about 7,000 located an hour southeast of Tallahassee. Her mama was a good Christian and her daddy was a country boy. A self-described “day-one Jesus stan,” she grew up in the Southern Baptist church, which dominated her childhood.

“Everything in my life revolved around church,” she tells me over a recent Zoom call. “Everyone I knew went to our church. I wasn’t allowed to hang out with people who didn’t. My life was entirely for Jesus.”

Around age four, Anhedönia’s mother pulled her out of daycare to pursue homeschooling. “God called her to,” Hayden explains, noting that even though her education was religious, that didn’t mean she grew up ignorant of the “nastier details of American history.”

Still, her exposure to culture was limited. Secular music wasn’t allowed in her home. Neither were most Hollywood movies. Attending cultural events in the wider community were out of the question unless they were faith-based.

“It was this weird upbringing where you hear about all these horrible things that have happened as being a part of the past. Then the present is this safe bubble where there’s nothing bad, and nobody swears, and no one gets hurt, like a perfect little paradise of Jesus,” she says. “It was completely normal until it wasn’t.”

The artist, now openly trans, noticed she pined after boys around the time she turned 12, told her mother as much at 16, then watched as her perfect little paradise suddenly soured: “I had the usual anxieties of a child, but when I told my family I liked boys all hell broke loose.”

Anhedönia’s sexuality suddenly became a town-wide concern. “Everyone thought I was a freak,” she explains bluntly. “I was stalked by adults who didn’t even go to our church through their children’s social media accounts. It was like a witch hunt.”

She escaped Perry after turning 18, when she got a job at a nail salon in a town an hour away. She remembers a moment shortly after moving out when she sat in a friend’s car listening to music, her foot dangling out the open passenger side door. The song slipped into the background as a wave of recognition washed over her. “I’m free,” she realized. “I survived. I’m in control now. This is the beginning of the rest of my life.”

Anhedönia began her transition a couple years later. Around that time, she also started translating the pious music of her youth into the twisted, though no less devotional, workings of Ethel Cain. Across three EPs — Carpet Bed, Golden Age, and Inbred — Cain sings of bloodied knees, school shootings, and being touched till she vomits. Without fear or remorse, Cain details not so much the loss of her faith, but rather throwing it up decades after it was forced down her throat. As she howls on “Head in the Wall,” a barn-burning reflection on where she grew up, “Fuck the cops, fuck God, and fuck this town for ruining us.”

Cain’s morbid subject matter moves beyond the rebellious dreams of a repressed youth to reflect the perilous lifestyle Anhedönia adopted after leaving Perry. “Within a year of moving out I had tried every drug on the planet,” she tells me. “I was having all kinds of meaningless sex with absolute strangers. It was out of control.”

A “divine intervention” led her to rein in her unbridled ways, a redirection she credits with saving her life. When I ask what constituted this intervention, Anhedönia points not to Jesus, but to Cain. “You can only run so much from where you come from,” she shares, ominously. “Ethel was my scapegoat — she kept running and ends up chained to a bed in an attic.”

“If I’m the good ending, she’s the bad one.”

Preacher’s Daughter introduces us to Ethel Cain, Anhedönia’s protagonist, in 1991, ten years after the untimely death of her father, the beloved town preacher. For the last decade, Ethel, her mother, and her granny have lived together under the long shadow cast by the preacher’s passing. When we catch our first real glimpse of her on “American Teenager,” it’s Sunday morning and she’s got a head full of whiskey. The catchy, gently thigh-slapping country lilt and lyrics about high school football and crying in the bleachers place us in a sleepy Southern town. But when Cain mentions a neighbor’s brother coming home “in a box,” a darker current emerges.

“He wanted to go, so maybe it was his fault,” Cain sings, matter-of-factly. “Another red heart taken by the American dream.”

Unmoved by the tragedy, by pretty much anything in her sad, suffocated life, Cain finds herself fatherless, heartbroken, with her faith in shambles. So she runs. She flees without a destination, just a burning will to go. But even as she makes her great escape, the music tells a different story. Released by Prescription Songs (the label owned by disgraced producer Dr. Luke), Preacher’s Daughter moves ploddingly, as if weighed down by the unyielding burden of generational pain. “Jesus can always reject his father / but he cannot escape his mother’s blood,” she sings on “Family Tree,” the album’s slow-burning opener. “He’ll scream and try to wash it off of his fingers / but he’ll never escape what he’s made up of.”

In one of the record’s most compelling moves, Cain transubstantiates the unavoidable surfacing of suppressed trauma into a man. He finds her on the side of the road, somewhere in Texas. “Baby, don’t run,” he tells her from his truck. And without any better plan, Cain hops right in. This is the story of “Thoroughfare,” a standout, nearly 10-minute-long track that produces one of the album’s closest approximations of all-American joy — love, electric guitar, and the open road. Heading west, Cain and her companion “find heaven” over meals in small-town diners and nights in motel rooms, where the former encounters “for the first time since [she] was a child…a man who wasn’t angry.”

The dream doesn’t last.

On “Gibson Girl,” the album’s smoky, tormented lead single, Cain’s man is revealed for who he is through an aching account of what he wants. “You wanna fuck me right now / you wanna see me on my knees / you wanna rip these clothes off / and hurt me,” Cain sings, not a shiver of surprise to her tone. Some part of her knew this was where she was heading. The signs were there. Perhaps she even still believes him when he tells her, “If it feels good, then it can’t be bad.”

Running, Cain learns, is hardly synonymous with being free. Whatever lingering hopes she might have had of her companion’s intentions are dashed to devastating effect on “Ptolemea,” a panic attack of a song, punctuated by the maddening buzz of flies.

“That sound represents the deepest darkness,” Anhedönia tells me. “For me, it’s that feeling where nowhere is safe. Nothing is going to save you. You can hardly breathe.”

Out of the flies comes the muffled, yet insistent voice of the man. “You poor thing / sweet mourning lamb,” he says with unmistakable menace. “There’s nothing you can do / it’s already been done.”

And it is here we reach the rotting heart of Preacher’s Daughter. Chained to a bed, waiting for death, Cain watches as the man turns back into what he always was: “I am the face of love’s rage,” he repeats twice before the end.

Whether it’s God, America, or just a man who looks “beautiful on his Harley,” untethered love can quickly become all-consuming. Anhedönia has been fascinated with cults her entire life, a fixation she attributes in part to being raised in one. “That’s one of the overarching themes of the record,” Anhedönia tells me, “having so much love for something that you morph into someone you can’t control.”

Because Anhedönia, if not Cain, knows that the reason to fear strangers is not just that they could hurt you, but that you might fall in love with them first.

Preacher’s Daughter is an album filled with grisly, haunting music — songs that conjure the sound of synapses shutting down; that wish stomach aches on cannibals. This is why it may be surprising to hear that arguably the most unsettling track in Cain’s body of work doesn’t appear on the album; that it is, in fact, a cover.

In recognition of National Woman’s Day this past March, Cain shared a rendition of Britney Spears’ 2004 ballad, “Everytime.” The original was always about the trappings of fame; the accompanying video finds Spears fighting off paparazzi before fantasizing about dying by suicide in a bath. But in Cain’s hands, the track resonates with a new, unnervingly prophetic urgency. Here is an artist with an acute sensitivity to control poised to release her debut album, to set off on a national tour, to potentially enter a new kind of existence where she is, once again, vulnerable to the clawing expectations of others — whether fans, agents, managers, paparazzi, or the various hangers-on who attach themselves to rising stars.

Having run from Perry, Florida to the Spotify studio in Los Angeles, where she produced and recorded her cover of Britney’s “cautionary tale,” could Ahnedönia have traded one cult for another? Is she out of the woods?

About a month before her debut is set to drop, I ask the musician if she’s ready for fame. “I don’t know,” she replies flatly. Pressed on the question, her tone turns raw: “I’m nervous.” Not so much that she’ll get caught up like Britney, she clarifies, but that her work will be misunderstood, or worse — willfully taken out of context. “It really stresses me out,” she says, “So I’m constantly reminding myself that not everybody’s going to get it. And the people who get it are the people that it’s for.”

Anhedönia has come a long way from Perry. One of the most significant changes in her life is the formation of a considerable and devoted group of fans, the Daughters of Cain. “That’s been one of my biggest hurdles as an adult,” she tells me. “I never had any intention of being famous. And I don’t want to be a celebrity. But people are coming to me, trying to talk to me. It’s daunting.”

As a result of the newfound attention, she has put limits on how she engages with those outside her closest circle. Still, she keeps a Tumblr page, where she lovingly answers admirers’ questions while sharing tender details from her life. These offerings are often hilarious. “What is it about orange juice and champagne that makes me want to talk about dick and only dick,” she asked recently. Sometimes, her posts strike with blunt honesty.

“Tbh i never rly wanted to be part of the music industry,” Anhedönia wrote last month. “I just wanna make my little soundcloud songs and sit by the creek and eat raspberries…i guess i’m stuck in it for a while though lol. i hope it doesn’t get any worse.”

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