Banner Photo Credit: Dollie Kyarn

After rising in popularity through her breakout album Preacher’s Daughter, Ethel Cain returns with Willoughby Tucker, I Will Always Love You, an album dedicated to love, loss, and obsession. Cain once again delivers a gut-wrenching portrait of an unravelling relationship, steeped in religious guilt and abusive dynamics. With raw lyricism, Cain cuts straight to the bone, bombarding you with the kind of love that feels more like holy possession, idolising her lover as a god while drowning in her own sense of unworthiness.

Having done a deep dive on the lore of Ethel Cain and her previous album Preacher’s Daughter, where she is traumatised by religion and ultimately cannibalised by her former lover, Willoughby Tucker, I Will Always Love You appears as a prequel to that horror. This album is the lighter side of Ethel Cain, as she navigates the aching of young love and the uncertainty that it presents for her future. Here, she is not yet disillusioned. She still daydreams of weddings and children, believing love to be enough to hold her relationships together.

The album opens with Janie, a desperate attempt from Cain to persuade her lover to stay, even as they’re already halfway out the door. She gently pleads, “Shoot me down, come on hurt me,” believing herself “deserving” of the violence her partner might bring. Here, Cain sets the emotional tone of the album, with loneliness being a greater threat to her than violence. Her fear of abandonment throughout the record drives her to justify— and sometimes welcome —any kind of behaviour from Tucker, so long as he doesn’t leave.

Sonically, Willoughby Tucker, I Will Always Love You reads more like a cinematic score than a conventional album, trading punchy vocals for rich and moody instrumentals like Willoughby’s Theme and Radio Towers. These interludes create a fugue-like space for the listener, allowing for reflection and immersion in the storyline of the record. Radio Towers, for example, includes the beep of a heart monitor, evoking the sterile panic of a hospital room in the listener and blurring the lines between fiction and lived experience. This sound also continues into the introduction of the next track, The Tempest, creating a sense of cohesion and chronology in the record.

Another feature of the album that stands out to me is its more acoustic sound in comparison to the high-gain guitar, heavy drums, and complex production of Preacher’s Daughter. Songs like A Knock at the Door instead showcase stripped-back arrangements and bare vocals, which adds to the vulnerability and intimacy of the record, a stark contrast to previous songs like Family Tree and Inbred.

In Cain’s lyricism, themes of death and religion are to be expected, and Willoughby Tucker, I Will Always Love You is no exception. Anhedonia makes overt references to death in almost every track of the album, “I hope I die today,” “I wanna die in this room”, creating a sense of impending doom and fleeting memory. She sings, “Everything I’ve loved, I’ve loved it straight to death,” exposing her fears of her own attachment being a destructive force. She continues to flirt with ideas of religious guilt and punishment in lines such as, “If you’re not scared of Jesus, f**k around and come find out,” thematically echoing a line in the song American Teenager from her earlier discography: “Sunday morning… I’m sorry if I seemed off but I was probably wasted.”

What I find especially powerful through many of her songs is the way she uses repetition, repeating phrases like incantations. The repetition of phrases like “I will always love you” is used, in my opinion, to represent the most fundamental of her desires. She often speaks in metaphor and anecdotes, but these repetitions serve as her most basic desires: “please don’t leave me.”

There is a palpable, gnawing connectedness Ethel Cain has to this other person, one that remains despite her eventual recognition of negative or “toxic” aspects of their doomed relationship. The last song of the album, Waco, Texas, at a staggering 15:15 minutes, ends the record like a funeral, Cain haunted by memories of a love lost. If the album is a journey through stages of grief, Waco, Texas is acceptance. No matter how desperately she tries to cling onto the relationship, love is not enough to keep her and Tucker together. As the album ends with the final line, “It’ll never be good enough like I want to believe it is,” Cain is finally, and reluctantly, forced to let go.

Final Thoughts

While I did love the album, I think the storyline in comparison to Preacher’s Daughter was a bit more scattered and the record didn’t feel quite as cohesive. That being said—Ethel Cain’s most recent album before this one, Perverts, was a lot darker and dominated by instrumentals and pull-drones, and I’d for sure take Willoughby Tucker, I Will Always Love You over that, if only for the sake of my mental health.

4/5 Stars

Ethel Cain has now kicked off her ‘Willoughby Tucker, I Will Always Love You’ tour that will continue until the end of the year, with her first UK show being in October. The album is available to stream on all major platforms.