God Bless Ethel Cain, and Other American Musings

Recently, I’ve been spending a great deal of my algorithm-guided time online obsessing over the idea of absolution. I’m not the only one. Over the past couple of months, there’s been an alarming rise in internet-generated cultural and ideological piety: for five dollars, a girl on Depop will deal you a virtual penance. New York’s Hottest Club is the Catholic Church. Tiktok thinks it’s actually kind of subversive to be a tradwife. Red Scare’s Dasha Nekrasova, darling of the online Gen-Z leftist movement, tells us, in her ever-bored way, that the great thing about faith is that it doesn’t have to be grounded in rational thought. Everything feels so senseless and pointless, so why not be a Catholic?. 2022 has seen a grotesque, bastardized rebirth of 20th century “trad” ideals in the one-dimensional way that only the internet can present. Religion is so glamorous, waifish girls with Amazon-purchased rosaries around their necks whisper to a forward-facing camera. Divinity is easy; look at these beautiful churches; look at the hot priest in Fleabag; look at this great and wonderful institutional commitment to beauty, to community. 

Enter: Hayden Anhedönia, alias Ethel Cain, if you are so inclined. Cain’s debut studio album, Preacher’s Daughter (2022), came out earlier this summer, a narrative album originally intended to serve as an accompaniment to a film of the same name. The story follows a central fictive character, Ethel Cain, as she, a transgender girl, leaves a religious household, gets picked up by a mysterious young nomad, travels across America with him before getting pimped out, killed, and cannibalized by the man she once thought of as her savior. Listening to the album feels like a chafing at some vaguely familiar sonic reality;having been raised on Baptist hymnals and Gregorian chants, Anhedönia suffuses the dreamy rock record with religious motifs. As the record progresses, her voice percolates from pure, earnest registers (“American Teenager,” “House In Nebraska”) to muddied, smearing ballads (“Gibson Girl”). Cain evokes both a homely-sounding comfort and electrifying sense of panic, most noticeable in the terrifying climax of “Ptolomea:” “Make it stop… stop… stop… STOP! STOP!”.

Cain closes the album as a non-entity, her body growing cold in her lover’s basement. Is Cain singing to us from hell? Is she in heaven? It’s hard to tell. Preacher’s Daughter is a glorious reflection on disaster, on the dangers as well as the ecstasies of piety and of American adventure. It operates with much of the religious aesthetic equipment that has become so popularized in the last couple of months via the internet, yet differentiates itself, in part because of the feeling of vastness contained within the album: the majority of the tracks on Preacher’s Daughter clock in at over six minutes, commanding a type of long-form attention from the listener which is unique in an era of ever-shortening track-times. This temporal commitment affirms the fact that this album isn’t a passing interest for Anhedönia/Cain, who locates herself at the intersection of America, religious unrest, and queer identity. Listen! The album seems to command. Sit here. Sit next to me. Clasp this terror between praying palms, close your fingers. Don’t let it slip through your knuckles. Listen.

Though the album feels, at least to me, like a fabulously well-thought out and fresh-sounding record (God knows there have been any number of misguided attempts to play on the all-American girl cultural canon), many have equated these religious aesthetics and midwestern motifs with Lana del Rey. Pitchfork’s Evan Rytlewski even gave Preacher’s Daughter an ambivalent 6.4, citing the fact that the album might have sounded a little fresher if Lana del Rey “hadn’t already mined these character types exhaustively.” Had she, though? 

Lana del Rey has, of course, successfully embodied the God-fearing American girl type and enjoyed international success from the character. She arrived at the forefront of American pop culture during an interesting renaissance of nostalgia: Born To Die and Ultraviolence came in the latter half of the Obama administration, during the nascency of contemporary social media: we liked Lana, we loved Lana, but looking back, Lana’s Americana was never concrete. Back in the Tumblr heyday, it seemed that we reckoned with America’s past by satirizing it through abstract assemblages of American iconography. Sure, we could reblog that picture of an empty Highway 66 diner. We could post that sultry audio, that Happy Birthday Mister President, that girl smoking a cigarette in front of a Corvette. The American past could so easily be divorced from its own context via these relatively new and popular media-sharing platforms— we relied on Lana, our beautiful all-American depressed white woman, to imbue this new hobby with some sort of nebulous yet identifiably national meaning. She could dance around the desert in a Native American headdress, she could talk about having sex with old men on the road, she could play the part of the wealthy Jackie Kennedy and she could be Marilyn Monroe and she could be Lolita— it didn’t really matter what part of America she was using as her own identity. What Lana del Rey was doing was collecting a distinct sensation of the new, fully digitized America; by extrapolating the most interesting and useful parts of the old America, there was a place to create an online and strangely beautiful, empty new.

Almost a decade after Born To Die, Ethel Cain has come out with an album largely rooted in the aesthetics of middle America, which evokes a similar sort of national ambience. It feels different, though, and darker. Unlike Lana, it doesn’t seem that the Cain character has the same choice of self construction the way Lana did: Cain can’t just create her own private and beautiful America full of the most attractive parts of various economic and ethnic groups. Cain’s America is severe and unforgiving— unlike Lana’s cool and empty nationalism, Cain’s overtakes. Like Lana, Cain ingests drugs, and she has sex with men, and she rides on Harleys, but Preacher’s Daughter does not even for a second allow us to think that this life is glamorous, or even really worthy of reproduction. The America of today, the America of the art produced in the age of the internet, is not ripe for the picking, and really, it never was for anyone but Lana del Rey. Cain’s America has taken her and gnawed at her until there is nothing left. Cain seems to be saying: Hey, it’s actually scary to be lonely. It’s scary to be unwanted. Are you sorry? Are you scared too? Is this America worth representing? Is God here? Cain so, so badly wants these answers, but she just can’t seem to find them.

There’s this line in “Sun Bleached Flies,” near the end of the album, after Cain has been murdered. She sings, in such earnest it feels painful, that “In the end, I knew that no one was coming to save me. So I just prayed/And I keep praying/And praying/And praying.”

And as I scroll through an internet algorithm which has assigned me the task of saving myself through some beautiful approximate digital religion, has assigned me with constructing a national citizenship through cultural association, it’s hard not to feel like Miss Ethel Cain, who is already dead. Who has already been consumed. Nobody is coming to save me, so I scroll ( pray) and scroll (pray). And I keep praying.

Article by Annie Bush

Photo by Silken Weinberg