Latest news with #Anhedönia
Yahoo
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Ethel Cain ‘Never Explored' Romantic Relationships Until 27: ‘Love Was My Final Frontier'
Hayden Anhedönia has had full creative control over the life and times of Ethel Cain, the driving vehicle of her musical output. Her upcoming album Willoughby Tucker is the latest extension of the Ethel Cain universe and operates as a prequel to her previous release Preacher's Daughter. It takes place in 1986 during the summer, warm months, during which the teenage character falls in love for the first time. The record was a way for Anhedönia to work through her own complicated emotions around love during pivotal coming-of-age years, but filtered through her real-life experience of entering her first relationship at the age of 27. 'Love was always my final frontier,' Anhedönia told The Guardian in a recent interview. 'I never explored it. I never processed anything. I never progressed past the idea of love that I had as a teenager.' This proved to be a roadblock as she delved deeper into the album creation process. The prequel, she said, was necessary for tying up some loose ends within the story and herself. 'That Ethel's entire story began with the love that she had for this boy … It felt like it needed telling,' she added. 'And come hell or high water, it was going to get told. It was practically seeping out of me.' More from Rolling Stone Ethel Cain Apologizes for Offensive Old Posts: 'Any Way You Feel About Me Is Valid' Ethel Cain, Sophie Thatcher, Beach Fossils Join Campaign to 'Abolish ICE' Ethel Cain Says She Hunted Down Synths From the 'Twin Peaks' Soundtrack to Make 'Nettles' The musician tried to keep the line between herself and Ethel separate, telling herself that 'it's all fictional,' she said. 'But sometimes I'll catch a lyric and it'll resonate exactly with how I'm feeling. And I remember that it's coming from me.' It was a grueling process, but coming out on the other side of it, Anhedönia realized that she had taught herself a lot, or at least Ethel did. 'I see Ethel Cain as a piece of me that I separate from myself and discard, so that I can make good decisions in life,' she said. 'If Preacher's Daughter was my learning experience of what not to do with trauma and healing, Willoughby Tucker has been my experience of what not to do in love.' She added, 'Ethel Cain lived and died loving and praying to be loved back. The entire Preacher's trilogy is centred around love. Love lost, love gained, love perverted, love stolen. Love is everything to us. It doesn't matter what you love or who you love, but that you love something – and that love is what propels you forward every day. For better or worse, I think that is a beautiful thing.' Earlier this month, Anhedönia addressed another extension of her healing journey after she admitted to using racial slurs in old social media posts made when she was trying to be as 'inflammatory and controversial as possible,' she said in a statement. 'All I can say is that I am truly sorry from the bottom of my heart, to anyone who read it then and to anyone reading it now. Any way you feel about me moving forward is valid,' Anhedönia wrote. 'As I move forward through my life, I aim to use my platform for good, for change, and for progress. I believe it's important to atone not through words alone, but through actions.' Willoughby Tucker is set for release on Aug. 8. It follows the singer-songwriter's latest album Perverts, a standalone release that arrived in January. Best of Rolling Stone Sly and the Family Stone: 20 Essential Songs The 50 Greatest Eminem Songs All 274 of Taylor Swift's Songs, Ranked Solve the daily Crossword
Yahoo
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Ethel Cain Apologizes for Offensive Old Posts: ‘Any Way You Feel About Me Is Valid'
Ethel Cain has released a lengthy written statement apologizing for old posts she made online when she was, by her own admission, trying to be as 'inflammatory and controversial as possible.' But in the same document, she also pushed back against the manner in which these old posts and images were dug up and circulated online, describing it as a 'massive smear campaign.' The posts that have resurfaced over the past few days (many of them from Twitter and the now-defunct Q&A platform Curious Cat) date back to around 2017 and 2018, and they contain the kind of edgelord bait characteristic of that era. Per screenshots, an account belonging to Cain (real name Hayden Anhedönia) admitted to using the n-word, responded to a post about mocking Hispanic people with 'build that wall,' and made rape jokes and fat-shaming comments. More from Rolling Stone Ethel Cain, Sophie Thatcher, Beach Fossils Join Campaign to 'Abolish ICE' Ethel Cain Says She Hunted Down Synths From the 'Twin Peaks' Soundtrack to Make 'Nettles' Ethel Cain Will Follow Album Release With 'Willoughby Tucker Forever' Tour In her statement, Anhedönia began by stating plainly, 'That was my account and those were my words. I was 19 and I was entirely aware of what I was saying and that was why I said it.' She went on to explain that she spent much of her high school years 'being extremely progressive and 'SJW' [social justice warrior]' as a way to 'reject the indoctrination of my environment and rebel against the prejudice, hatred, and ignorance of the culture I grew up in.' After moving out of her parents' house, though, Anhedönia said she 'flip-flopped' and rejected 'all notions of my former 'cringe SJW' behavior and intended to be as inflammatory and controversial as possible. I would have said (and usually did say) anything, about anyone, to gain attention and ultimately just make my friends laugh.' Anhedönia continued: 'I could tell you that I had no idea at the time the platform I would have in the future, or tell you I just have a dry and extremely sarcastic sense of humor, or make any other kind of excuse, but there's no place for excuses in this matter. At the end of the day I am white, so while I can take accountability for my actions, there's no way for me to fully understand the way it feels to be on the receiving end of them. All I can say is that I am truly sorry from the bottom of my heart, to anyone who read it then and to anyone reading it now. Any way you feel about me moving forward is valid.' Anhedönia said she now looked at this chapter of her life 'shamefully,' adding, 'As I move forward through my life, I aim to use my platform for good, for change, and for progress. I believe it's important to atone not through words alone, but through actions.' But Anhedönia also pushed back against the way these old posts were dredged up, claiming the screenshots were 'obtained through extensive digging, hacking, and cooperative effort amongst a group of individuals who do not care who else is hurt by witnessing this media as long as I am ultimately hurt the worst in the end.' Along with all the old posts, Anhedönia said some of her personal accounts had been hacked (including her Spotify page), her family had been 'doxxed and harassed,' and photos of her as a kid and 'intimate details of my past have been passed around for fun.' 'I urge you to recognize the patterns of a transphobic/otherwise targeted smear campaign, especially in this political day and age,' she wrote near the end of her statement. 'This information was hoarded until the perfect moment arose to unleash it.' Anhedönia added: 'I am responsible for my actions and taking accountability for the mistakes I have made in the past, but everything beyond that is brutal slander, targeted harassment, and in the words of my own attackers, bullying with the end goal of me killing myself. My team and I are taking this matter seriously and are pursuing legal recourse under the fullest extent of the law.' While Anhedönia was largely contrite in her statement, there were several specific images and accusations that she addressed directly. These included a photo of her in a homemade T-shirt emblazoned with 'LEGALIZE INCEST,' a drawing she made that some have referred to as child pornography, a photo of her that some have claimed is evidence of sexual abuse toward animals, her mock-up of an Ethel Cain missing poster for her album Preacher's Daughter based on a real missing poster made for a nine-year-old girl who was abducted and murdered, and claims of misogyny and 'fetishization of the female experience.' Anhedönia's responses to those allegations are printed in full below. 1. Regarding the topic of incest in my artwork, it's a layered experience. I have always been interested in creating art centered around the taboo. Much like all the other topics explored in my work, it was just another part of human nature I wrote about it. However, with specific instances such as my hand drawn t-shirt (which was a ridiculous item I made in my bedroom that was never intended to be and never has been any kind of merch distributed to other people, just to clear that one up), at the time I was still of a somewhat inflammatory mindset and fully made that t-shirt to be a crude joke to garner attention. I had even been labeled 'incest girl' on Twitter in that time period, I suppose because the people I surrounded myself with knew I was a white girl from the bible belt, and that was their joke that I leaned into. As an artist with a fanbase comprised of many victims of sexual/emotional abuse of an incestuous nature who find comfort in my music because of it, I understand how painful this could be. I apologize deeply if my actions have caused you any further grief and if I have let you down. I do want to be clear, however, that I have never fetishized it. Rather, as a lonely and confused child I had my own complicated personal struggles with the concept during puberty (in a hypothetical manner, not involving anyone in my actual family). I have since untangled these feelings and I now understand their root. While sometimes the topic of incest may get intermingled on a song with my own experiences of sexual abuse or my own familial traumas, I have never and would never fetishize such a sensitive subject. All of these topics I'm going to discuss have carried the brand of 'fetish' as this is a common talking point for the transphobic brigade of individuals attacking me. 2. Regarding the topic of drawn child pornography, based off of one drawing I made at 19 years old. I am going to be brief about this because this is quite possibly one of the most serious offenses I can fathom. I had three individual characters that I drew often from the ages of 18-20, each character being a different age in that bracket. The character of Teddy, who was 19, was a hypersexual character born out of my own struggles with sexual trauma and assault. At the time of that drawing, I had just been raped by a man twice my age weeks before. The way I processed this was the opposite way I thought rape victims were supposed to behave, as I leaned into sadomasochism and became fixated on the event and thought that somehow sexualizing it in a way I could control or desire would make it more bearable, as though I wanted it. This was reflected in my artwork. All other details aside, the character was the same age I was and had the same extremely slender body type I had at the time. I utilized a more cartoonish-hybrid style for my characters occasionally as was the norm for artwork in my scene on the internet around that time, but the character was still of the same legal age I was and that has always been the case. I will not be discussing this topic again. 3. Regarding the topic of sexual abuse towards animals, because yes that is somehow also an accusation against me. I was at a Fourth of July party out in the sticks at a friend's house and the majority of us were topless because we could be. My friend's dog hopped in the truck with me and I messed with him by putting him in a headlock for a few seconds while a friend took a picture. My bare breast was squished against his face for all of two seconds. I can't believe I'm even addressing this. 4. Regarding the missing poster included in the promotional materials of Preacher's Daughter. I made that poster at 3am in a rush and was googling '1990s missing poster' looking for any kind of template to use that would seem period accurate for the character. I picked that one out of all the search results because it was in the yellowish color palette and had a font/visual language that I thought would match the other visuals for the album. I absolutely should have done my research on the poster I chose, and I understand how this could be hurtful and damaging to the family of that child. I insist that this was nowhere close to my intention by using it. Hindsight is 20/20 and I would not be so careless in that regard again. However, the accusations of me fetishizing the kidnapping and murder of a child are beyond egregious and ridiculous. 5. Regarding the topic of misogyny and 'fetishization of the female experience'. Cis women are not the only people capable of being victims of sexual assault. They are not the only people capable of being abused, kidnapped, or murdered. To posture that I have never been harmed in my life as a child or an adult trans woman, or that fearing the very real possibility of being harmed again, kidnapped, or killed as a trans woman is somehow a 'fetish', is entirely willfully ignorant and hateful. No one knows what I have been through in my personal life, and I feel zero need to share it with the world because it's no one's business but mine. You can debate the ethics of artistic expression until you're blue in the face but you cannot tell me what I have experienced and how to process that because you simply were not there and you do not know me. Preacher's Daughter is a deeply personal story to me, born from my traumas and deepest fears. If it reads as a fetish to you, then that is your problem and not mine. Best of Rolling Stone Sly and the Family Stone: 20 Essential Songs The 50 Greatest Eminem Songs All 274 of Taylor Swift's Songs, Ranked Solve the daily Crossword
Yahoo
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Ethel Cain Goes Quietly Into the Darkness
Folks have been talking about the dissolution of the album format for years now, as streaming culls out singles and embeds them in appropriately themed playlists. The experience of listening to an LP in order has become kind of a novelty for some – the cohesion of each song bleeding into the next has been scrapped, the intended story deferred. Ethel Cain (a.k.a. Hayden Anhedönia) doesn't make music for playlists — as evidenced, once more, by her sophomore LP, Willoughby Tucker, I'll Always Love You. Like a sweet-voiced Stephen King, Anhedönia pens epics that unfold against pastoral scenes of God's Country where people try and fail to lacquer over the innate horrors of living. In many ways, she's almost more performance artist than musician, composing her 2021 EP, Inbred, in the basement of an old Indiana church, and conjuring the Southern Gothic saga of the fictional Ethel Cain, a character Anhedönia created for 2022's Preacher's Daughter. That album — which mingled Lana Del Rey moodiness with dashes of the club — followed Cain as she fled an abusive father, only to end up murdered and cannibalized. More from Rolling Stone Ethel Cain 'Never Explored' Romantic Relationships Until 27: 'Love Was My Final Frontier' Ethel Cain Apologizes for Offensive Old Posts: 'Any Way You Feel About Me Is Valid' Lana Del Rey and Addison Rae Duet 'Diet Pepsi' in London Anhedönia says Willoughby is a prequel to Preacher's Daughter, telling the tale of Cain's first love. Like Anhedönia's previous releases, the record feels like a haunting — like you're trapped in a decaying house, listening to a ghost that will only rest when its story is finally told. (You can see, then, where we were going with the anti-playlist thing above). Yes, there's the single 'Fuck Me Eyes' — the liltingly bitter ode to the popular girl who the town paints a slut — but in essence, the record is more a wash of words and sweet sounds than a collection of singular songs. And what gorgeous words those are: 'pretty boy/Natural blood-stained blond,' ('Dust Bowl'), 'my honey's heart is blue and a second offbeat' ('Waco, Texas'), 'hold me, smell of mildew I wanna die in this room' ('Janie'). It's easy to get lost in the haze — to wander down the echoing corridors of lyrics and synths and strings. Still, Willoughby lacks the dynamism of its predecessor, the ecstatic neon highs and chilly basement lows. That makes sense, of course, in that this is the story of a first love, a small town, quieter horrors. Seen as a whole, though, that quietness can sometimes verge on monotony, songs running into the next with little to grab onto — like an evaporating phantom. Best of Rolling Stone Sly and the Family Stone: 20 Essential Songs The 50 Greatest Eminem Songs All 274 of Taylor Swift's Songs, Ranked Solve the daily Crossword
The Guardian
25-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘I've long struggled with my identity in pop': Ethel Cain on fandom, first loves, and being inspired by David Lynch
Something strange happened to Hayden Anhedönia in January. The 27-year-old artist known professionally as Ethel Cain was finishing off her upcoming album Willoughby Tucker, I'll Always Love You when she had to go to court. 'I got into some traffic trouble,' she says coyly in her soft southern lilt. The plan was to drive from the courthouse in her home city of Tallahassee, Florida, to Toronto to wrap the album with her longtime collaborator Matthew Tomasi. 'Listen,' she continues, leaning forward into her webcam – a glint behind the eyes, conspiratorial tone in the voice. 'I don't know what happened in that courthouse, but I walked out of there having been put on probation. I couldn't go to Canada. I couldn't go anywhere.' As a result, Tomasi flew down to Tallahassee. They holed up in Anhedönia's tiny home studio and didn't leave until it was done. When they weren't working, they watched Twin Peaks for the first time. 'Every day it was wake up, work, Twin Peaks, work, Twin Peaks, work …' They binged the whole thing in two weeks. Anhedönia even hunted down the synths that composer Angelo Badalamenti used on the soundtrack and sprinkled them on a few of her own tracks. One night they finished working, watched the final episode, and went to bed. She woke up to the news that David Lynch had passed away. 'I was really happy that I finished the show while he was still alive,' she says. The synths 'felt kind of like an homage. A way to keep David and Angelo and Laura [Palmer] alive in some small way.' Lynch's work stages epic battles between darkness and light, pitting the purity of the individual against the corruption of the world; small-town life versus primordial forces of evil. The same battle plays out on Willoughby Tucker, which tells the story of what Anhedönia describes as 'a deeply traumatised love story between two kids who are in love, but the world weighs on them'. It's also present in her debut album, 2022's Preacher's Daughter, a southern gothic tale of a teenage girl named Ethel Cain who flees the confines of her religious upbringing only to be murdered and cannibalised by her boyfriend. The grisly subject matter made for unlikely breakthrough material, but Preacher's Daughter ended up becoming one of 2022's most critically lauded pop breakouts. In the space of a few months, Anhedönia jumped from collaborating with niche SoundCloud rappers to being featured in Forbes' 30 Under 30 and fronting campaigns for Givenchy, Marc Jacobs and Miu Miu. When Preacher's Daughter was rereleased on vinyl this April, it broke into the Top 10 in the UK, Australia, the Netherlands and the US, where Anhedönia made history as the first publicly trans musician to reach the Top 10 of the Billboard albums chart. As far as ascents to fame go, Anhedönia's was a baptism of fire. She has attracted the kind of invasive, obsessive fandom typically reserved for A-list pop stars. Owing to her sharp cultural commentary and eviscerating political takes – in a viral post after Trump's election, she wrote 'If you voted for Trump, I hope that peace never finds you' – her social media accounts are routinely trawled for 'problematic' content, and her criticism of the US healthcare system has been discussed on Fox News. Speaking to the Guardian in July 2023, Anhedönia expressed a desire 'to have a much smaller fanbase'. 'I've long struggled with my identity in pop,' she reasons now. 'I love pop music, but my issue for a while was the way fandoms operate.' Having seen the violence and trauma of Preacher's Daughter spun into flippant memes, she had feared that any future release would be similarly received. 'I've since made my peace with that. At the end of the day, you make what you make and you put it out and people can do what they want with it.' A recent firestorm over screenshots of things posted when she was 19, however, shows how merciless the spotlight can be. A slew of comments, including the use of racial slurs and rape jokes, were dug up from a 'shameful' period during which she tried to be as 'inflammatory and controversial as possible', as she phrased it in a lengthy apology. 'That was my account and those were my words', she wrote, adding that she was now 'truly sorry from the bottom of my heart'. But she hit back at further online speculation that she was 'pedophile, a zoophile, or a porn-addicted incest fetishist'. She had been, she wrote, the target of a 'transphobic/otherwise targeted smear campaign' that had also led to her personal accounts being hacked and family doxed and harrassed. Anhedönia holds several positions that can be hard to reconcile. She's a trans woman who grew up in the conservative southern Baptist community in the Florida panhandle, and still has a deep love affair with the area. She looks like one of the ethereal sisters from The Virgin Suicides, and talks like a girl next door refilling your coffee at a roadside diner, peppering her musings on existentialism and Eraserhead with homely expressions of geez and whatnot. She has experienced sexual trauma and assault, while her music often leans – in her words – 'into sadomasochism' and 'the taboo'. Those nuances are often not acknowledged. 'A lot of people don't know how to interface with media that contains negativity or perversion or sexuality or immorality,' she says. 'It's not the first instinct to engage with these things critically – but when you see a bad character on screen, the movie shouldn't hold your hand and say: Hey, that's the bad guy. That's your job.' In January, Anhedönia released Perverts – an experimental departure from Preacher's Daughter, let alone standard pop fare. Billed as a standalone project, the hour-and-a-half sprawl of ambient, drone and slowcore compositions roots around themes of shame, guilt and pleasure. There are no hooks, no choruses and barely any lyrics. Rather, its unsettling blend of industrial murmurs and desolate spoken word reflects Anhedönia's experience of wandering 'the Great Dark' – her term for a brief but 'scary' winter when she was struggling to adjust to life after coming off tour. Some listeners found it a challenging listen; others considered its references to madness and masturbation alienating. But it successfully reasserted the wide spectrum of Anhedönia's music, which switches from soaring heartland pop-rock to sprawling abstract noise. 'Now that the other end of the Ethel Cain spectrum has been established, I feel like I have a full range,' Anhedönia says. Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion The second instalment of the Preacher's trilogy, Willoughby Tucker serves as the prequel to Preacher's Daughter, and has a similar structure – a pop-oriented first half full of youthful optimism, which plunges into slow burning instrumentals and thundering power ballads as the hammer of reality comes down. Beginning in the summer of 1986, it finds Ethel Cain as an insecure teenager 'trying to navigate her first love in a broken world and a broken town'. It wasn't the plan to go back in time. Anhedönia intended to move forward, on to more 'mature' things, but something kept nagging at her. 'That Ethel's entire story began with the love that she had for this boy … It felt like it needed telling. And come hell or high water, it was going to get told. It was practically seeping out of me.' Finishing the album was 'honestly really sad, especially knowing where Preacher's Daughter goes. Sometimes it's hard for me to listen to. I tell myself it's all fictional, but sometimes I'll catch a lyric and it'll resonate exactly with how I'm feeling. And I remember that it's coming from me.' Part of the difficulty in making Willoughby Tucker was the fact that Anhedönia had, at 27, recently entered into her first ever relationship. As she worked on this album, all her own 16-year-old anxieties came back. 'Love was always my final frontier,' she says. 'I never explored it. I never processed anything. I never progressed past the idea of love that I had as a teenager.' There were times when she was crying every day, begging for the album to be finished. She's glad of the process now. 'I see Ethel Cain as a piece of me that I separate from myself and discard, so that I can make good decisions in life,' she says. 'If Preacher's Daughter was my learning experience of what not to do with trauma and healing, Willoughby Tucker has been my experience of what not to do in love.' In the real world, bleak as it is, Anhedönia is determined to live well. Smiling between two long curtains of mousey brown hair, she reels off a list of reasons to get up in the morning: 'A great breakfast, a beautiful sunrise, paying for someone's groceries if they can't.' And then there is love – in her view the most 'high-risk, high-reward' feeling in the world. A few days before we speak, she 'hard launched' her new relationship, sharing a video of her new boyfriend lifting her up on a truck parked on a dirt road, and kissing her. 'Ethel Cain lived and died loving and praying to be loved back,' Anhedönia says. 'The entire Preacher's trilogy is centred around love. Love lost, love gained, love perverted, love stolen. Love is everything to us. It doesn't matter what you love or who you love, but that you love something – and that love is what propels you forward every day. For better or worse, I think that is a beautiful thing.' Willoughby Tucker, I'll Always Love You is released on 8 August.
