Preacher’s Daughter
On her expansive debut album, singer/songwriter/producer Hayden Silas Anhedönia introduces her alter ego Ethel Cain, a Southern anti-belle desperate to escape the smothering grip of familial trauma, Christianity, and the American dream. On *Preacher’s Daughter*, the Florida-reared conceptualist and recovered Southern Baptist finds a sense of freedom in darkness and depravity, spinning a seedy, sweeping, slowcore yarn of doomed love and patriarchal oppression with cinematic ambition. Cain allows the titular preacher the first word on droning opener “Family Tree (Intro),” then teases a little pop-star charm on the twangy “American Teenager,” before digging her teeth deep into sex, drugs, violence, and rock ‘n’ roll with the provocative pout of Lana Del Rey. She laments a lost love on the heartland heartbreaker “A House In Nebraska,” hitchhikes west on the sprawling Americana saga “Thoroughfare,” and spirals into Dante’s hell on the thunderous industrial nightmare “Ptolemaea.” Cain’s voice haunts and lingers like a heavy fog, long after she’s devoured by a cannibalistic lover—in a blaze of glam-metal guitar—on the album’s grandiose finale, “Strangers.”
On her debut album, the 24-year-old Tallahassee native briefly makes good on her instinct for mass-appeal pop anthems, but most of the 76-minute album dwells on roiling gloom and smoldering Americana.
There's a substance and cohesion across Ethel Cain's Preacher's Daughter that's lacking on most debuts – and yet there's clearly so much more to come from this incredible artist and the rich world she's created.
The artist’s debut LP interweaves powerful genre influences and haunting narratives, beginning to chart the Ethel Cain lore…
Change, escape and identity are not easy things to navigate, and ‘Preacher’s Daughter’ is the dark, unsettling, sprawling beauty that comes out of it.
Like Lana Del Rey before her, Ethel Cain has joined an esteemed list, not by zooming in on one aspect of life in the U.S.A., but in capturing the exhilarating, frightening, bittersweet whole.
Preacher's Daughter by Ethel Cain Album Review by Sam Franzini. The singer/songwriter's LP is out today via Daughters of Cain
The introspective singer explores identity and religion amid a backdrop of seedy Americana on this rich, haunting debut
Hayden Silas Andhedönia - who performs under the name Ethel Cain - harbours the sort of innate understanding of aesthetical importance in music that only someone who came of age in the 2010s could. On her staggeringly ambitious debut album Preacher’s Daughter she channels a lifetime of trauma, cultural experience and religious battles into a