GLOW IN THE DARK

American singer-songwriter Ethel Cain follows up her debut with a mesmerising concept album, writes Louis Chilton, as The Black Keys disappoint and Memory of Jane surprises us

- By Louis Chilton

The past is alive and fraught on Willoughby Tucker, I'll Always Love You, the new album by Ethel Cain. Over the course of 10 long, disarmingly personal tracks, the 27-year-old American singer-songwriter – real name Hayden Anhedonia – plunges into

The past is alive and fraught on Willoughby Tucker, I'll Always Love You, the new album by Ethel Cain. Over the course of 10 long, disarmingly personal tracks, the 27-year-old American singer-songwriter – real name Hayden Anhedonia – plunges into the dark psychology of small-town adolescence with unsparing verve.

Willoughby Tucker is framed as Anhedonia’s second studio album - the intoxicatingly sparse Perverts, released earlier this year, is considered a separate project - and a “prequel” to Anhedonia’s 2022 breakthrough, Preacher’s Daughter.

Fixating on teenagedom can be a hazard for ascendent twentysomething artists - it comes across as either a cynical pandering to a young fanbase, or a sort of arrested development, a refusal to grapple with the more complex truths of adulthood. Willoughby Tucker avoids this by leaning full-tilt into the past’s inky unpleasantness: it’s a slice of down-home Americana filtered through the disorienting sensibility of David Lynch. (Anhedonia has spoken about obsessively watching Twin Peaks throughout the making of the album, and Angelo Badalamenti’s iconic synth soundscape has imprinted itself here.)

“Hold me, smell of mildew/ I wanna die in this room,” sings Anhedonia, in the first lines of the album’s opening track, “Janie”, a slow, elegiac number with shades of Phoebe Bridgers. “Fuck Me Eyes”, the album’s second single and its standout song, is a churning indie rock number inspired by Kim Carnes’s “Bette Davis Eyes”.