daughters of cain: a love letter
ethel cain & the music of disappearance
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*content warning: like…a lot. violence, gore, etc, nothing graphic but this is about ethel cain’s album that is literally about murder and cannibalism, just fyi.* you can listen to it here. also: SPOILER alerts for the album.
1.
All those times you almost disappeared. All those drops in your stomach. Knottings in your gut. Thorns sneaking up your throat and cutting into your breaths. All those times you knew something was wrong or off or not quite right. All those churning, cold moments of self-gaslighting, of am I being crazy am I just paranoid oscillating towards I think I should leave I think I need to get out of this situation. All those shaky decisions, made quickly and uncertainly, but made, somehow.
2.
We open on a teenage girl. Lanky and flax-haired and contemplative. She’s somewhere in rural Florida. Small town. Small life, she always thinks, exhausted by the blank expansiveness of it, by the narrow perimeters of white cul-de-sac imaginations and being a good girl, languishing in boredom and thus in goodness, somehow. She’s Ethel Cain. Her father is the beloved local preacher and she’s supposed to be the gold running through his blood, supposed to be the good daughter, the loyal and graceful and grateful and vacant-brained daughter, an uncomplicated image, a familiar one. But she is tired of being bored, and she’s daydreaming far too much for her father’s liking, and her limbs are starting to fester from all that waiting-around and sitting in church pews. She wants to stretch her hands. Uncurl her fists. Take off the face powder and pale day dress and do something, anything, to startle herself. She wants to detonate, just a little, just for a moment.
Preacher’s Daughter opens with “Family Tree (Intro).” Ethel’s voice trembles in, lush and haunted and immediately magnetizing in the way anything uncanny is: “These crosses all over my body / Remind me of who I used to be / And Christ forgive these bones I’m hiding / From no one successfully.” This is a Southern-gothic kind of longing, a la Flannery O’Connor and Tananarive Due, but swampier, dread-laced and still romantic, rot creeping up the hem of a dirty wedding dress, vines choking a dilapidated house with some deeply fucked-up history, bones and sweat and high school sweethearts on sweat-stained mattresses and dust suffocating everything. Daughterhood is self-mythologizing, yes, but, simultaneously, self-desecrating; she builds us a chapel of her girlhood and its pastoral surfaces and meticulously, gorily disassembles its body piece by piece, song by song.
3.
Preacher’s Daughter is an album that functions more like a novel (which it will be, eventually, actually), constructing a detailed, multi-layered world, and its underground, to be traversed and interpreted by the listener. The production (by the artist herself!) saturates the whole narrative in a constant, peripheral feeling of estrangement, pressing into the songs and Ethel’s voice from all sides, creating distance but claustrophobia too, a warped and disenchanted omniscience. You can’t listen to it casually. You have to really deeply truly engage to fully appreciate its power, and I say this as unpretentiously as I can.
Ethel Cain is a character, a fiction, a persona, invented and embodied by the (brilliant!) Florida-born musician and writer Hayden Anhedönia. Ethel Cain is invented, sure, but she’s still real, similar to the way that, for me, the horror genre often feels like the most honest and true expression of so many things/feelings/affects that otherwise would stay inarticulable, all the fiction and archetypes, stylized imagery and tropes/conventions/archetypes and plot devices and monsters or hauntings or massacres often engorging reality so profusely that something is somehow exposed, revealed, articulated.
Trauma, for one, has felt most representable via the exaggerated, visible scenarios and nightmare logics of horror. Ethel Cain is real in that she is a character and she is an extreme character at that—an embodiment of many of the worst-worst, most garish violences we can envision, and also, on the surface level, paradigmatic of the most overdetermined American fantasies—and the extremeness of her (sonic/lyrical) world actually enables an exhumation of the truest of feelings, the realest and most visceral and intimately familiar of sensations.
Ethel operates as concurrent storyline and storyteller, in Preacher’s Daughter; her role as focalizing agent is, from the very beginning moments of the album, tenuous and seemingly inflected by history—personal, bodily, and national. She is in control of the story she tells and yet she’s also seemingly beholden to it, unable to escape or excise its snaking parasitic presence in her bloodline. The album submerges you: it builds a specific atmosphere that feels akin to a chokehold, and its thumbprints are so distinct, so specific and self-referential and consistent in their grip, that to meaningfully compare Preacher’s Daughter to anything else feels kind of impossible. But I suppose I’ll try, anyways: listening to this album felt like reading a Shirley Jackson novel but with lots of gore and sex, rendered ridiculously beautiful, always twisting in your stomach and also flooding you with these rushes of sudden disarming light. I mean that I’m tempted to read this album as I would a novel or any other text—closely, obsessively, analyzing the form and content and intertextuality and all that perhaps eye-roll-inducing (but fun!!) shit.
What I love about it is really how it requires you pay real, devoted attention to it. It is not an easy or smooth listening experience. If you just halfheartedly listen to it, it’ll still sound good, but you’ll miss almost everything that’s actually happening—listen to it with a *metaphorical* stethoscope, which sounds ridiculous but I mean it. I love albums that are dedicated to constructing a world, full of corridors and tunnels and underground routes, histories and futures and desire paths. I love being thrown into it like that, and how, when you are literally close-reading an album like this, you get to stay in this prolonged space of startling yourself, of discovering new things even within a familiar plot. You do the excavating, you sit with Ethel and listen and really listen and even annotate and it’ll likely/hopefully be one of the most rewarding, gutting, surprising musical experiences you’ll ever have.
4.
In a profile for the New York Times, Anhedonia describes the Ethel Cain persona as “a mixture of my favorite final girls in horror movies and Billy Graham.” This might be one of the most compelling descriptions of a character ever—think the blood-smeared scream-laughter of Sally Hardesty mixed with zealous, theatrical, doomsdaying televangelism.
It’s fucking great. In the same piece, she describes the strange merging of media/influences that comprise her upbringing: an uncanny cocktail of Christian choir music, Gregorian chants, old horror movies, and a constant stream of true crime pummeling her psyche via her grandparents’ TV. “I love overkill—I’m nothing if not dramatic,” she says, and that devotion to “overkill” is maybe the best thing about her music.
There’s so much horror and uncanniness embedded into the marrow of gendered experience, because, well, the enforcement of the gender binary is a constant mindfuck that isn’t easily escaped. Ethel Cain (and Hayden herself) is also trans, and as a nonbinary person myself, Preacher’s Daughter’s wielding (and subversion) of societal scripts about desire, “womanhood,” trauma, sex, and agency express a lot of what’s nightmarish or strange about gender identity and self-perception.
It’s not the focus of the album, but it’s not irrelevant. When we’re forced to incessantly police our own gender identities and presentations, when we’ve no choice but to be critical and reflect on our gender, a very different experience emerges than those of cis people, I think, and it’s a criticality that can be fucking exhausting, relentless, but also, something I wish cis people had a lot more of themselves.
5.
In the corner, on my birthday
You watched me, dancing right there in the grass
I was too young to notice
That some types of love could be bad.
—from “Hard Times.”
You can hear the crickets, the creek running, birds chirping, Ethel humming, ghosts wading in and out of the water. “Hard Times” places you inside of this familiar, uncanny world, carries that same texture of half-dreamt childhood memories, flashes of light and laughter and dirt-smeared hands and bruised knees coalescing into a faded image. Sometimes it’s hard to discern the tender parts from the bone, the sweetness from the salt. Sometimes they become indistinguishable, enfolding nostalgia and fear into one distorted sensation, of free-falling, of climbing up and out of the creek. That’s what “Hard Times” does. What most of the first half of Preacher’s Daughter does. There is love littered throughout, and there is also terror, hurt, and there’s attention to all those elements.
There are secrets a lot of us live alongside, when we grow up as girls—taught and trained and assumed to be girls, I mean. Secrets that just fucking linger and keep lingering. Salt constantly poured in an infinitely-self-opening wound at the most unexpected of moments. I was talking to my friend, a cis guy, the other day, about all the rules and lessons girlhood—in all its different variations—almost always involves in some way or another. I was trying to explain something that Rebecca Solnit once put best, in a podcast (I forget where), about how women live on, essentially, the precipice of annihilation all the fucking time and yet that precipice, or, rather, the feeling of standing on it, of being there, inches away from a cliff’s edge, is so deeply and routinely normalized that we tend to forget that we’re even on the cliff, or that, maybe we shouldn’t have to live our lives on the edge of anything other than the whole natural business of mortality itself.
I think about how I can reduce girlhood to all the ways I was conditioned, implicitly and explicitly, to police myself, my very existence and presence in the world. How we know things, like, don’t live alone on a ground floor apartment, or, lock your door the second you get into the parking garage but also probably don’t go alone into a parking garage especially at night, don’t go out running with a ponytail, grip your keys between your fists but also know how to throw a punch or actually better yet claw at their eyes or knee them in the crotch, check under your bed before you go to sleep, make sure you leave a strand of hair, make sure you scratch him so his DNA gets under your fingernails, and so on, and so on. The tiny warnings and all that “common sense” that is actually the collective metabolizing of a horrific and senseless reality. Don’t be paranoid, don’t be constantly afraid or hostile to men, but also, you should always be on guard, you should’ve known better.
All those contradictions bundled and naturalized. I think of the excuses men have made or continue to make whenever I bring it up. That’s just how humans are. It’s not a gender thing. There’s always gonna be bad people out there.
I always wonder if they were trained in these ways, too, over and over, bludgeoned with this cognitive dissonance that becomes as unremarkable as breathing after a while. I wonder if they’ve ever finally felt safe for a moment and, that very moment is when the pin drops, when the facade collapses, the theatre disassembles. I wonder if they’ve experienced what happens when you’re made to feel endangered just by virtue of existing as yourself—as a “girl,” as a femme person, as a gender-nonconforming person, as a trans woman of color, as anyone outside of the gender binary—and to know that you’re your own alarm system, even though you’ve also been taught to smother your instincts lest they offend the men in your life.
I listen to Ethel Cain and flames build in my chest, singeing the edges of my sternum. All those years of softening the edges of the stories, of flattening horror so that we don’t annoy anyone too much with our nagging, silly, persistent fear. How normal our own interior violences become. All of that—it doesn’t just go nowhere, and listening to Cain reminds me of that. But not just what terror can feel like: what rage, too, can become, in a girl’s shaking scabbed hands.
6.
The drunk, gut-punched dizziness of it—his mouth against your skin, ungluing you, putting you back together. Making you feel real for a minute or two. How anything can begin to resemble love if you’re hungry enough, if your horizon is distorted enough. The storyline continues: Ethel, meeting Isaiah, somewhere in Texas on the thoroughfare, pistol in her pocket, his truck, his wide-open smile. She gets into his car. They go west. They stay in shifty motels and eat at roadside diners and begin to unravel towards each other, begin to flicker closer, frantic moths drawn to some untraceable light.
Ethel sings: “In those motel rooms, I began to see you differently / Because for the first time since I was a child, I could see a man who wasn’t angry.” “Thoroughfare” is ebullient, buoyed by that newbornness that emerges from fresh intimacy, the way learning the scars and curves and corners of someone new can peel your skin back and deliver you back to the world in a rawer form. This is a moment, we think, of genuine tenderness, of something good, for Ethel, finally, and maybe it’ll last, for once. Maybe it’s not the house in Nebraska—the dream-house of a younger Ethel, back when she first fell in love, with a boy named Willoughby—but it’s something. It’s warm enough.
This is where this album split me apart, indelibly. Ethel gives us this brief glimpse of weightlessness, and we almost believe in it, can’t help but believe in it. There’s a new gospel, I mean, and we’re buying into it—much like Ethel’s father has trained his congregants to do.
And then there’s what comes after.
7.
“Gibson Girl” is a descent—a sultry, misleading song that slowly leads us to some grimy entrance to hell. It’s sexy, but underneath all that it’s deeply unsettling, like some sugary drink that also…contains lead: Ethel does the sugar/lead, arsenic/candy juxtaposition very well. The song coaxes you into believing what it’s selling, paralleling the way Ethel herself buys into the story she’s being told by the men around her, having to believe it, internalize it, in order to survive it, or at least try to.
Buying into the male gaze can feel like power, like gasoline, like you’re choosing your own degradation. But there’s always a cost—there’s always a trap embedded into what appears to be a particular type of freedom.
I don’t want to give it all away. Preacher’s Daughter should be experienced, fully, intimately. The storyline verges into a darkness you can’t really forget—a darkness that also, again, is so uncanny because it is so recognizable even in its sheer horror.
The first time I listened to “Ptolemaea,” really listened, I was laying in the dark, in my bed, while the rain dripped outside, earphones in, volume up. I wasn’t expecting what came. I don’t know the last time I heard a song that physically, palpably scared me like that—undid me, pulled the rug out from beneath me and dropped me down a dark well. But “Ptolemaea” did that. I’ve never experienced a better, more horrific representation of what trauma—specifically, the knotted-up trauma of all that gendered, patriarchal mindfuckery—does to you, how it disjoints you and doesn’t ever quite dissolve, how there are bad bad feelings you don’t speak about because you’re supposed to be healed, at a certain point, or to be okay enough to mostly forget about it. As if healing ever really ends. There’s something important and complicated about the desire to live beside the wreckage rather than try to entirely resolve it, that feels true, and I think that’s maybe why this song seems to affect so many of us in a similar way.
The horror isn’t hiding anymore. The horror is bleeding through Ethel’s terrible, nauseating, perfect scream, and the way she says no, no, no. The horror is baring its stained shark-like teeth and digging into our skin, biting through all our attempts to pretend it isn’t there in the room with us. There’s too many stories embedded into the marrow of this song, too many familiar and blood-lit nightmares coagulating into one piercing moment. There’s every last drop of girlhood suddenly unstrung, the wet braided innards of our worst fears and worst memories and worst stories glistening and smoldering and piling up on the floor. I know this is nauseating. I know it and Ethel knows it, leans into it, doesn’t make the experience go down easy, doesn’t gloss or soften anything into a love story or a made-for-TV movie.
The emptied gaze of a man you thought you loved, who loved you back. A sky drained of blue, all of a sudden—and where did all that color and light go? How did you not notice till now? He’s disassembling the seams of your fantasy, your faith in goodness or men or love or safety, bone by bone, tooth by tooth, smiling the whole time, still calling this blood and shit love.
The knot. In your stomach. Behind your ribs. Beneath your throat. In your internal narrative. Wherever. There’s a knot and you ignored it, or didn’t quite feel how big it had grown till right now. Till it begins to calcify.
Daughterhood. The boredom and blood and nostalgia and pain of it. Suddenly exposed. Suddenly pulled apart, offered to wolves.
I can’t quite distill what the song does. It contains all of those sensations and more. It makes you feel what many people don’t want to begin to feel, understandably, but also, it gives you an allotted time and space to feel it all within. There’s a way out, even though there’s not really one for Ethel herself.
8.
But: my two favorite songs on the album might actually be the two instrumentals.
“August Underground” is named after an infamous, grotesque 90s snuff film. I won’t explain why, but once you listen to the album all the way through, you understand it, appreciate the choice of title. The song feels like being swallowed into the very stomach of the storyline—that sounds like a bad line from a Pitchfork dudebro essay, but it’s actually true. I mean it. I could compare it to a lot of things: Grouper (who Anhedonia was definitely influenced by), Daughter’s soundtrack for Before the Storm, the sensation and atmosphere of rotting, sleeping in a body farm, mud and leaves filling your mouth, the particular slow-percolating dread of Fire Walk With Me…but it’s not reducible in that way.
And then there’s “Televangelism.” Which, when I first listened to it, immediately brought me to tears, the messy stinging ugly kind. It’s familiar, but it’s like reverse deja vu, like an aural premonition, or maybe the word I’m looking for is hope, wish, longing. Whatever it is, it’s the feeling I think I’ll spend my life crawling towards. It’s what I hope death feels and sounds like (that’s also what the song is about…all the neurons firing off as the brain shuts down), so achingly stupidly ecstatic and beautiful that it feels closer to reverence than any of the lyrically religious songs on the album. It reminds me of this one Ada Limón poem, specifically this part:
J said, You don’t believe in God? And I said,
No. I believe in this connection we all have
to nature, to each other, to the universe.
And she said, Yeah, God. And how we stood there,
low beasts among the white oaks, Spanish moss,
and spider webs, obsidian shards stuck in our pockets,
woodpecker flurry, and I refused to call it so.
The wordlessness is exactly how “Televangelism” brushes up against the divine, for me. The divine being not quite identifiable as god but as…something.
And: this entire song was improvised. Which only reaffirms that mysticism. With any other artist or song, I’d think assigning that word—mystic—would be ridiculously contrived and over-the-top, but Ethel Cain is definitely a canonical girl-mystic of the South. The muse is a girl; the girl is the muse and the writer, the prophet and also the words spilling from her own cherry-Chapsticked mouth.
9.
God loves you, but not enough to save you.
God loves you, but not enough to pick you up and bring you up there. Not enough to rescue you from every man on earth, every last clawing of patriarchy and peril. Not enough to put your body back together, to make it real again.
God loves you but that love is conditional. Lacking. Tenuous, volatile. Nothing to rely upon.
Ethel, wearing her Sunday best. Her childhood a warm desert full of snakes. How many times can you step over their hiding places, their holes, their dark tunnels, before you trip, before you feel sharp little teeth sink into your ankle?
Ethel, now. Blue and alone.
10.
In your basement, I grow cold
Think back to what I was always told
Don’t talk to strangers or you might fall in love
Freezer bride, your sweet divine
You devour like smoked bovine hide
How funny, I never considered myself tough…
“Strangers” is one of the most beautiful songs I’ve ever heard, and one of the most deceptive. Without context, it doesn’t immediately reveal its bloodiness—but once you listen to it a second time, paying close attention to every lyric, the sweltering nightmare emerges clearly, undeniable and fully, deeply imagined.
(Love between your teeth and coming back up your throat, acrid. Love that tastes metallic and gamey, kind of rotten. Love that nauseates you, makes you throw it back up, spew red bile everywhere. Love that isn’t really love but something else, something harder, colder, crueler.
And still. Sometimes, instead of biting the hand that feeds us, we kiss it, offer it more of our affection and attention, our forgiveness. Sometimes we just want to be touched, even if it’s by a hand covered in our own blood.)
11.
This is how girls get written out of their own lives: someone murders them. Someone squashes their story between their hands because they’re bored, or pissed off, or insecure and resentful. Someone cuts off their breathing and stops the story before it can really fully begin. Someone excises a girl from her own existence as if she’s an insect to be smushed by a shoe, or a hangnail to pull loose. Someone—almost always a man—decides to cut the thread and make her recognizable only as a victim, a crime scene, a name dropped on TV and podcasts and between whispers of women gossiping in grocery stores and between girls at sleepovers, muttered under covers at three in the morning. She gets blamed. She gets fetishized. She is no longer real except to those that knew her, really knew her, loved her. She is a cautionary tale, a sullen lesson to be studied and resisted, a myth disguised as a memorial. She is almost always blamed for what’s happened to her.
Ethel is a white girl, yes. And when white girls go missing, they are often actually paid attention to, mourned, looked for, at the very least. Whereas the rest of us don’t become martyrs or angels in death. But also, it’s a strange, bladed kind of “privilege,” to be martyrized, sainted, to be looked for but…found dead. You are still gone. You are still dead. You might get sympathy, but what use is sympathy, once you’ve already lost your life?
Ethel is torn apart by that uniquely Christian strain of guilt, not even for any one specific sin but for merely existing as she is in the world. She begs, over and over, I tried to be good, am I no good? Am I no good? There is no answer. There is no refuge. Only that buildup of shame, biting at her heels.
12.
Ethel disappears, and she goes somewhere darker than we could’ve really anticipated. She ends up in Isaiah’s stomach, making him feel sick. She asks, over and over, am I making you feel sick, at first with some lingering concern, but that concern quickly mutates into rage, unrepentant and haunted, expansive, filling the room. She’s glad to make him sick, to be the burn in his belly, the acid crawling up his throat, that sickly metal taste in his mouth. She’s glad he can’t digest her, can’t stomach the ruin of what he’s done to her.
It’s a tragic ending, but also, she has the last word.
She has this last moment of agency, of resistance, making it hard for him to consume her. And she doesn’t end the song addressing her killer: she ends it by addressing her mother:
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.
Preacher’s Daughter doesn’t sweeten the ending, doesn’t offer a well-lit route back to safety. Ethel has been (spoiler alert) murdered and eaten—there’s nothing sweet here. But there’s a tenderness like a thread pulled through a needle, as Ethel’s voice transitions from enormous anger-stunned despair to a moment of sudden unhidden love, not for the men who’ve taken her apart but for her mother, for the prospect of some kind of peace for the both of them, even if it’s after life.