Here lies the Preacher’s Daughter: What’s next for Ethel Cain?
“In your basement, I grow cold.” Those are the first words of the last song on Preacher’s Daughter, Ethel Cain’s debut album. It’s a concept piece created by Hayden Silas Anhedönia that tells the story of Cain, a young girl from a small Christian community, abused by her father and running away from heartbreak right into the arms of danger, where she ultimately meets a grizzly end. In the album’s final moment, our narrator and protagonist dies, so where does she go from here?
In its essence, Preacher’s Daughter is a horror story about generational trauma. “Jesus can always reject his father / But he cannot escape his mother’s blood / He’ll scream and try to wash it off of his fingers / But he’ll never escape what he’s made up of,” Cain sings in the album’s prelude, foreshadowing exactly what is to come. Throughout, there is the suggestion that her character is fated to meet a dark ending. With so much pain and suffering in her family, it seems like the women in her family, or the ‘Daughters Of Cain’, are doomed by their blood.
In the moment where the girl is brutally murdered by her lover, a sermon is read. “Blessed be the Daughters of Cain / Bound to suffering eternal through the sins of their fathers committed long before their conception.” So, as the album’s narrator says her final goodbyes from beyond the grave on the record’s closing track, it’s the prophecy of pain coming to life.
But with the figure of Ethel Cain lying dead, how does that work when it comes to the artist’s next steps? Anhedönia’s creation of the album and this character was a complete labour of love and passion. For anyone who delves into the record, it’s incredible the amount of lore connected to it and just how in-depth the story goes.
That’s nothing new. Plenty of artists have taken on personas or created albums from the perspective of a certain character, such as Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust or The Who’s Tommy. But the difference here is that Ethel Cain, while being the character, is also Anhedönia’s moniker. The two are inseparably interwoven, so what lies next now is that the voice of that figure is dead and gone?
Anhedönia already admits to feeling separate from the girl she embodied on that record. She told Vogue that she doesn’t “feel like her anymore – it’s like she’s dead and gone, and I’m just telling her story now”. But even still, it’s clear that she’s not done yet with Cain’s story and world.
Even beyond considering what a new album might look or sound like, Anhedönia has plans to take Ethel Cain’s story further with a novel. The musician has been working on the written take on the tale for a while, telling The Line Of Best Fit that the book will expand it even further, saying, “I’ve actually had to stop reading interpretations because they make me so crazy. She continues: “I’ve had to learn to ignore whenever they get the lot wrong. I’m like, ‘Let me put the book out, and then you’ll understand what’s gone on.'”
It seems to be that what people forget in their interpretation is the gospel laid out on ‘Ptolemaea’, the track where her sermon is read. In the spoken section, the voice goes through the family, blessing the cursed daughters and mothers doomed by the actions of the fathers and husbands. It’s the revelation that Cain’s fate and story are bigger than her and that even while the character is dead, the story Anhedönia’s music tells of is only just starting.
“Who’s in the story most is the grandmother,” she said to The Line Of Best Fit about the book and the world of Cain. “It’s a cautionary tale. It’s the story of this woman who experiences something and the way it affects her life, and the way that her actions, in retaliation, affect the rest of her family’s lives for the next fifty years. When I talk about Ethel Cain, the old woman with the hair pulled back in the white dress and the freaky-deeky old-timey American – that’s the grandmother, the matriarch of this whole story. She’s where it started and where it ends.”
It’s clear that this character is someone that Anhedönia intends of visiting as she added, “I’m excited to eventually get to her, because that’s the horror story: that’s where things get the darkest and the series of events are revealed that lead to Ethel Cain, her granddaughter, dying in some basement.”
There has been talk for some time that what could be coming next is Preacher’s Wife, with the tale switching focus to Cain’s mother and Grandmother, expanding the world into the wider context of this doomed family. This has already begun on some older tracks like ‘Two-Headed Mother’ or unreleased tracks like ‘Wrestling In Dirt Pits’. Some eagle-eyed fans have also wondered whether the visuals at her latest shows hint at this, with Cain wearing a ring on her finger and with her projected images moving away from the Preacher’s Daughter aesthetics and instead showing her dressed as an older, more reserved women as she switches character to the family’s matriarchs.
But there is really no way of knowing. With the unreleased tracks she plays at her gigs, including the minimalist and atmospheric ‘Amber Waves’ and ‘Punish’, it seems like the artist is allowing herself to follow her creative wills and whims, experimenting with more ambient sounds. “I’m moving away from that need for validation and toward an acceptance of my own craft,” she said after the release of Preacher’s Daughter, so it’s clear that whatever happens next, Anhedönia will be following her heart, whether that brings her back to the world of Ethel Cain nor onwards to a brand new form.
