The song that defined the Ethel Cain era of Hayden Silas Anhedönia
“All of this, since the debut, has to do with Ethel Cain, the granddaughter’s character,” Ethel Cain said in a recent interview before dropping the bomb, “So we are now, after this record is over, officially closing that chapter.”
It seems that after the release of Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You, we’re done, and so, here lies Ethel Cain.
No, let’s be real. Anyone who’s paid any attention to the world of Ethel Cain knows that this isn’t an end. Crafted by Hayden Silas Anhedönia back in 2019, her artistic project has largely revolved around the telling of a fictional story; that of Ethel Cain, a young girl raised in an abusive religious family who runs away only to find more heartbreak and horror.
On Preacher’s Daughter, it’s told song by song. On the upcoming release, Anhedönia is flashing back with a prequel to the debut. But then, after that, as the artist said, the chapter is being closed.
This could simply be a sign that she’s ready to move on to other figures in the story. Anhedönia has previously talked about plans to dive into the character of Cain’s grandmothers and expand the story even further. But it can’t be ruled out that this might be a complete and utter end to the world of Ethel Cain. With the prior release of Perverts showing a glimmer of other things the artist is interested in, perhaps this really is time calling on the fictional tale to instead explore other ideas. And so, if that’s the case, what one song would summarise it?
The problem with this question is that the songs all work in tandem. As the aim is to tell a wider story, each track appears like a chapter, adding more information or providing a new emotional move or plot point. But at the end of Preacher’s Daughter, right after ‘Sun Bleached Flies’ feels like an epilogue or a summarising finale, there’s something else.
It feels like ‘Sun Bleached Flies’ would have been an immediate answer for this, as Cain wraps up her story with a big, almost rock opera moment with arms swaying in the air, singing “If it’s meant to be, then it will be”. It’s supposed to feel summarising and concluding, but Anhedönia’s choice to not end the album there, and instead end it on ‘Strangers’, is revealing.
In fact, if any song encapsulates the entire Ethel Cain story, it’s ‘Strangers’, starting first with Anhedönia’s move to trick listeners into believing the album might end on that previous moment of hopeful peace, only to plunge them into darkness. When the preceding track ends, we can assume the character is dead, but there’s something settled and nice, as the hymn-like quality is calming. And then the rug is pulled out from under all that with ‘Strangers’ revealing the grizzly fate of the protagonist being not just dead, but being half-cannibalised in her killer’s freezer.
It’s insanity in the way only Anhedönia might be brave enough to be, but it’s also genius. Just as the entirety of the Ethel Cain project can work on several levels, either being taken as one giant fictional concept or merely enjoyed as good individual songs, ‘Strangers’, for a while, allows the same dichotomy as she sings of stockholm syndrome half as a loving thing, and half as the horror movie fate of her character. By the mid-point, when the guitars come in huge and harsh, her screaming “Am I making you feel sick?” works on those two levels too, as she asks the villain, both are you sick with regret at what you did, and quite literally, you have eaten me, do you feel sick? Once again, insanity. But brilliant insanity.
And then it ends. “Don’t think about it too hard or you’ll never sleep a wink at night again / Don’t worry about me and these green eyes / Mama, just know that I love you / And I’ll see you when you get here”, the character sings as her last message, and that’s it. The end.
So while Anhedönia has granted the character a second album with more of a voice, in terms of the narrative, ‘Strangers’ is the closing of the chapter and one that sums it all up in both story and the artist’s visionary streak.
