The history of pop is one of artists playing make-believe, of hiding their authentic selves beneath glitter and fake nails and tall hair (and that’s just Bono). From David Bowie dressing up as a glam-pop alien to Charli XCX pretending to be a personification of messy womanhood, trying new facades on for size and then chucking them aside is a core part of the megastar toolkit.
That compulsion to slip beneath the skin of a fantasy caricature of yourself is likewise on display across the career of 27-year-old Hayden Anhedönia. As Ethel Cain, the Florida-born, Southern Baptist-raised record producer and model has taken on the persona of an All American small-town ingenue as a means of exploring and celebrating her love of Southern Gothic stereotypes.
Cain is an elusive creation, a heightened version of Anhedönia but also a songwriter with an assured pop touch. Her landmark achievement to date was the single American Teenager. Here is perhaps the best early Taylor Swift song that Taylor Swift had no hand in creating, and a tune that won Cain a huge fan base. (Her Dublin shows have always been straight sell-outs.)
Channelling your hopes, fears, angst and joy into an alter ego can take a lot of pressure off you as an artist. As soon as the make-up comes off and the roar of the crowd fades, you get to shut the door and go back to being yourself. But it can also lead to a blurring of identity. That is something with which Anhedönia has wrestled as her star has ascended. Where does Hayden end and Ethel begin? And what if there is no end or beginning? Where does that leave them?
READ MORE
It “creates problems that you don’t realise. I thought it was going to protect me, and it was going to be Ethel Cain’s problem, but then you get into this kind of interesting thing where you start to get eclipsed by your own character,” she told the New York Times recently.
“So I keep jumping across this line and doing this funny dance where I’m figuring out, “Where is she? Where am I? Who is she about me?”
As that dilemma has weighed ever more heavily on her, it has pushed her music in surprising directions. There has even at times been a sense of a musician at war with their own popularity. Not hostile towards her fans, exactly, but ill-inclined to pander or to churn out facsimiles of American Teenager.
Such was the message of her second album, Perverts, a weird, muted piece of left-field electronica released in the grey gloom of January this year. American Teenager and the accompanying LP, Preacher’s Daughter, were suffused in the haze of a hot summer. But Perverts was the opposite: a plunge into Aphex Twin-style ambient music that fazed those fans who would have been perfectly happy for Cain to continue as William Faulkner’s idea of Taylor Swift.
But you can only really get away with one such curveball in your career. After burning down the house, what do you with the ashes? That’s the question Cain grapples with on her excellent third album, Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You.
It’s a gorgeously vulnerable record about a fictional teenage romance between Cain and a mysterious Nebraskan named Willoughby Tucker. It is also, at moments, baffling and mysterious. Cain can crank out a Lana Del Rey-style woozy banger in her sleep, and she does so several times here, most notably on Fuck Me Eyes, which sounds like The Cure soundtracking the Louisiana-set first season of the supernatural crime show True Detective.
Yet these flashes of pop transcendence are tucked away in deep folds of ambient pop. The opening track, Janie, for instance, sounds like a late-1990s “post-rock” instrumental group that wished it were Mogwai or Godspeed You! Black Emperor. Fittingly given her obsession with Americana cliches, there are also deviations into David Lynch-style small-town eeriness, such as Willoughby’s Theme, audibly inspired by Laura’s Theme from the Twin Peaks soundtrack.
A feverish, dreamlike project finishes beautifully with the 10-minute ballad Tempest, followed by the 15-minute Waco, Texas, a swirling chunk of disembodied rock that somehow carries in its DNA the pop spirit of major-label stars such as Del Rey while also feeling inspired by the late-1990s drone artists such as Flying Saucer Attack. It’s thrillingly eerie and a stunning conclusion to a remarkable record.
