Ethel Cain’s favourite sad songs
Ethel Cain’s standout debut album, Preacher’s Daughter, isn’t just sad; it’s downright devastating. As she takes her listeners through the story of Ethel Cain, the concept album deals with the heavy topics of religion, abuse, grief, heartbreak, and violence. Managing to make an art form out of cutting right to the heart, it’s no wonder that her own tastes veer towards the melancholic.
Ethel Cain is the brainchild of Hayden Silas Anhedönia, using the character as a vehicle for her songwriting. Even as she writes the fictional story, the album is rich with lyrics that feel deeply vulnerable and confessional. The voice she gives Cain is so emotive, weaving between depression and defiance across the tracks. She colours her with all the shades that ‘sad’ music can take, as the feeling is perhaps the most dynamic of them all.
Musically, the album is dynamic, too. The messy feeling of sadness takes many shapes. On ‘A House In Nebraska’, it’s slow, discordant, and then balladic. On ‘Hard Times’, it’s soft and sparse. On ‘Strangers’ or ‘Ptolemea’, it merges with pure, punky rage. This varied language of sadness is something Anhedönia clearly learnt through being a music fan herself and a fan of all kinds of genres.
When Interview Magazine asked her what she listens to at home, she said, “Lots of ambient music. I keep blankets over all my windows and tornado footage looped on my TV 24/7.” She picked out ‘High Gravity’ by Wulven as a favourite and a perfect example of the way that even ambient music, with an absence of words, can be deeply emotive. Anhedönia proves this in her own work, both in the instrumental tracks on Preacher’s Daughter, as well as the ambient Soundcloud project she revealed this year. To her, sad ambient sounds are the kind that you should “loop that for hours and lie on the floor”.
But for a track to provide outright catharsis, to finally let the sadness pour out, and the feeling swells up to the surface, she recommends ‘American Tradition’ by Nicole Dollanganger. “It actually goes beyond crying,” she said, “It makes my eyes glass over, and I check out of reality until it’s over.” Leading with a sombre solo guitar and an almost uncanny, child-like vocal, Dollanganger’s song feels like it would exist within Ethel Cain’s world. Both in sound and lyricism, it bottles the same Southern Gothic aesthetic that Cain has come to represent.
Much like on her own album, the sound of sadness isn’t always a soft, tender thing to Anhedönia. Her soundtrack to melancholia also features heavier, gothic songs like Deftones’ ‘Beware’, Black Sabbath’s ‘A National Acrobat’, Electric Wizard’s ‘Funeraloplois’, and Catherine Wheel’s ‘Black Metallic’.
There’s also a creepy, folky element to her choices. Swedish singer Anna Von Haussewolff’s ‘The Mysterious Vanishing of Electra’ tells an unsettling story through a mix of traditional instruments and synth licks. Similarly, Chelsea Wolfe and Emma Ruth Rundle’s ‘Anhedonia’ seems to stand as an anthem for the singer.
Anhedonia, the true surname of Ethel Cain, is actually the term that defines the inability to feel pleasure. It’s the title given to one of the most smothering symptoms of depression. It’s apt then that the singer has become one of modern music’s patron saints of the feeling, able to weave the saddest stories into pure art.
