Ethel Cain Willoughby Tucker, I'll Always Love You

The Florida-born singer-songwriter’s 2022 debut album, Preacher’s Daughter, was not exactly standard pop fare—a Southern Gothic odyssey steeped in themes of original sin and family trauma, whose fictional protagonist (spoiler alert) dies at the end. Nevertheless, the album broke through to the mainstream, even cracking the Top 10 of the Billboard 200 following its vinyl reissue this spring. Her long-awaited second album, January 2025’s Perverts, sat somewhere between passion project and provocation; its 90 minutes of eerie ambient collages seemed designed to challenge fans, if not shake them off entirely. Eight months later, Cain’s third album revisits the narrative that began with Preacher’s Daughter, whose centrepiece, “A House in Nebraska”, is a melancholy ode to Willoughby Tucker, the protagonist’s first love. Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You functions as a Preacher’s Daughter prequel—a story of two young, damaged lovers for whom doom is a powerful aphrodisiac. “I can see the end in the beginning of everything,” she sings on the reverb-drenched “Janie” before concluding grimly: “It’s not looking good.” Between sprawling ambient-folk stunners like “Nettles” and “Tempest”, Cain slips in a handful of moody instrumental interludes à la Perverts and a pair of fan favourites initially released as demos: “Dust Bowl”, a staple of her live sets for years, and the 15-minute “Waco, Texas”, for those who like their slow-dance numbers with a hearty dose of fatalism and a sprinkle of ’90s cult lore. Fitting for a concept album set in 1986, there’s also “Fuck Me Eyes”, a synth-pop power ballad starring a hell-raising, denim-wearing angel.