Hayden Anhëdonia is a master mythologist. As the creator of Ethel Cain, pop music’s reigning undead goth princess, she signaled a vibe shift away from the nonstop millennial moralism of the Trump 1.0 era and toward something darker, sicker, and more immersive. Her 2022 debut Preacher’s Daughter is one of the decade’s genuine left-field hits — possibly the pop cult success of the 2020s, so long as Chappell Roan no longer counts as a cult hero — and the single “American Teenager” remains a stirringly subversive spin on post-Taylor Swift coming-of-age anthems. In an era where “empowerment” and “trauma” became overused buzzwords in album PR announcements, Anhëdonia stood out with songs drenched in cannibalism, murder, and sexual perversity, among other transgressions.
There are, however, limits to her virtuosic prowess for spinning beautiful BS. For instance: In a recent interview, Anhëdonia claimed that she watched Twin Peaks while making her new album, Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You. Nothing surprising about that — few musicians of her generation are better suited for the adjective “Lynchian” than Anhëdonia. However, she insisted that this was her first time watching the iconic television series. And, I’m sorry, but even in the fanciful world of Ethel Cain, that statement strains credulity. It would be like if Quentin Tarantino declared that he caught his first Scorsese movie just last week.
Then again, it’s possible that Anhëdonia hasn’t studied Twin Peaks as closely as I assume. Along with co-creator Mark Frost, David Lynch pulled off two very different feats with that show. On one hand, he crafted something wholly unlike anything on television, a meditation on moral corruption and small-town secrecy that indulged fearlessly in atmospheric and semi-subliminal visual abstractions. On the other hand, Twin Peaks also worked as conventionally satisfying television, with well-written characters and a compelling mystery that captured the cultural zeitgeist. To make a musical analogy: Twin Peaks functioned as both an experimental ambient record and an easily accessible pop tune.
Striking that perfect balance has been a challenge for Anhëdonia — if she’s actually interested in that balance. “American Teenager” proved that she’s capable of dominating the “easily accessible pop tune” lane, and Willoughby Tucker similarly frontloads the pair of captivating singles released prior to the album release, “Fuck Me Eyes” and “Nettles.” The former track is another variation on the “Hot Topic Taylor Swift” vibe of “American Teenager,” with cinematic lyrics about a lusted-after sweetheart who “goes to church straight from the clubs” and “looks just like her mama before the drugs.” (Like Lana Del Rey, Anhëdonia can play with redneck tropes in a manner that both highlights their camp silliness and red-meat Pavlovian resonance.) The latter song, meanwhile, more or less resembles a straightforward country-pop ballad, albeit one laced with spectral synth lines played on the same keyboard used by the late Twin Peaks composer Angelo Badalamenti. (It also features the album’s best storytelling lyric: “We were in a race to grow up yesterday / Through today, ’til tomorrow / But when the plant blew up, a piece of shrapnel flew and slowed that part of you.”)
While those songs were used as teasers to draw listeners to Willoughby Tucker, they aren’t really representative of the overall record. “Dust Bowl” is more indicative — a glacially paced mood piece trained on a sadomasochistic relationship dynamic (“I knew it was love / When I rode home crying / Thinking of you fucking other girls”), it’s noticeably stingy when it comes to dishing out dynamic musical morsels. It unfolds largely as an unchanging block of sound, where the appearance of a distorted guitar riff at the song’s midpoint feels like a drop of water in an arid desert. It hits hard, but it’s not enough.
Anhëdonia’s albums are never lacking for backstory. She’s described Willoughby Tucker as a prequel to Preacher’s Daughter that delves into the Ethel Cain character’s titular high school sweetheart. As she explained to The Guardian, it’s set in 1986 (five years before Preacher’s Daughter) and concerns the teenaged Cain “trying to navigate her first love in a broken world in a broken town.” The problem is that the story is much clearer when Anhëdonia talks about it interviews than when you’re listening to her music. As is the case with all concept albums, the particulars of the plot matter less than communicating a certain essence to the listener. And on Willoughby Tucker, that essence often seems hazy and not fully baked.
I wrote favorably about Cain’s previous release, the 90-minute so-called EP Perverts, which arrived in January as a strident anti-fame provocation. However, I admired it more as a gesture than as music — her willingness to tweak the expectations of her audience felt courageous given the aggressive push for pandering fan service in all corners of streaming-dominated media. But after Willoughby Tucker, I’m starting to wonder if she has a misplaced sense of where her strengths lie. A lot of her new album, supposedly the “pop” follow-up to the experimental EP, deals in the same sort of elongated instrumentals that populated Perverts. Between them, “Willoughby’s Theme,” “Willoughby’s Interlude,” and “Radio Towers” drone on for nearly 20 minutes, despite having severely limited melodic ideas. What’s worse is that she also saddles her pop songs with that same room-tone bloat, seemingly out of the misguided belief that it makes her music more profound or momentous. Album closer “Waco, Texas,” for example, would have been a perfectly good power ballad if it lasted eight minutes (about as long as “November Rain”) instead of 15. But on Willoughby Tucker, more often means less.
Once Anhëdonia gets over her Twin Peaks phase, I hope that someone can point her to another classic of teenaged angst and monumental dread, Disintegration by The Cure. Like David Lynch, Robert Smith has a gift for larger-than-life romantic doomerism. Like Hayden Anhëdonia, he also loves long, scene-setting instrumentals, like Disintegration‘s entry point “Plainsong.” But the main reason why Disintegration became part of the “cool weird kid” syllabus is that it also has multiple hit singles, including “Lovesong,” “Pictures Of You,” “Fascination Street,” and “Lullaby.” It’s unrelentingly bleak and highly tuneful. Anhëdonia has already shown an ability to make songs that sound just as huge. I just wish she would allow herself to do it more often.
Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You is out now via Daughters Of Cain Records. Find more information here.
