Latest news with #HaydenAnhedönia
ABC News
12-08-2025
- Entertainment
- ABC News
Ethel Cain announces 2026 Australian shows as part of her Willoughby Tucker Forever world tour
Ethel Cain is coming to Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane and Fremantle, as part of her Willoughby Tucker Forever world tour. The Floridian — real name Hayden Anhedönia — will bring her Southern Gothic alter-ego to Australia in February 2026, with a set of five shows, kicking off with two nights in Naarm's Palais Theatre before heading to Eora's Hordern Pavilion, Meanjin's Fortitude Music Hall and Walyalup's Fremantle Arts Centre. She's here off the back of acclaimed second album Willoughby Tucker, I'll Always Love You . It marks her first time here since 2023, when Ethel spellbound audiences at Vivid Sydney, Dark Mofo and Melbourne's Rising playing through hits from her debut album Preacher's Daughter , widely celebrated as one of 2022's best releases. Since then, she's catapulted to mainstream attention, with her dreamy alt-pop anthems like 'American Teenager' and far more experimental work captivating audiences drawn to her dark, cinematic world. In 2025, she dropped Perverts , an experimental drone-based work, before dropping Willoughby Tucker on August 8, a conceptual prequel to her debut album about doomed lovers. Led by reverb-soaked 'Janie' and featuring plenty of tender folk moments ('Nettles', 'Tempest'), it's a moody, deeply felt listen. Find the full dates below, with tickets on sale Monday 18 August 11am local time via Ticketmaster, with presale information available here, too. Ethel Cain's Willoughby Tucker Forever tour. Ethel Cain's The Willoughby Tucker Forever Tour - Australia 2026 Saturday 16 February - Palais Theatre, Melbourne, Boonworrung Country, VIC Saturday 16 February - Palais Theatre, Melbourne, Boonworrung Country, VIC Monday 17 February - Palais Theatre, Melbourne, Boonworrung Country, VIC Monday 17 February - Palais Theatre, Melbourne, Boonworrung Country, VIC Saturday 21 February - Hordern Pavilion, Sydney, Gadigal Country, NSW Saturday 21 February - Hordern Pavilion, Sydney, Gadigal Country, NSW Wednesday 25 February - The Fortitude Music Hall, Yuggera Country, QLD Wednesday 25 February - The Fortitude Music Hall, Yuggera Country, QLD Saturday 28 February - Fremantle Arts Centre, Fremantle, Noongar Country, WA
Irish Times
08-08-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Ethel Cain: Willoughby Tucker, I'll Always Love You review
Willoughby Tucker, I'll Always Love You Artist : Ethel Cain Label : Awal 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.
Yahoo
08-08-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Ethel Cain midnight listening parties to sweep U.S. record stores. Will Nashville have any?
Indie rock singer Ethel Cain's highly anticipated sophomore album is almost here. Nashvillians could be among the first to hear it. On Aug. 8, the 27-year-old singer born Hayden Anhedönia will release her record "Willoughby Tucker, I'll Always Love You." This week, Cain announced that indie record stores around the U.S. and Canada would be the first to premiere the record. In the late evening on August 7, record shops will spin the record shortly before the clock strikes midnight. "Be the first to listen to my new album at your local indie record store," Cain said on Instagram. "Contact your nearest participating store for more details. We made a special item available only at the listening events!" Which Nashville record stores are hosting Ethel Cain listening parties? Vinyl Tap and The Groove are hosting Ethel Cain listening parties. Clarksville's AndVinyl Records and Chattanooga's Yellow Racket Records are also participating. The Groove's listening party will kick off on Aug. 7 at 11 p.m. When the clock strikes midnight, fans can leave the store with their own copy of the record. Vinyl Tap's event will also start at 11 p.m. On an Instagram post, the store said that they have exclusive posters available to give away with the record. Is the Ethel Cain tour coming to Nashville? No, Ethel Cain's upcoming Willoughby Tucker Forever Tour in promotion of the new record will not be coming to Nashville. Options for Nashville fans include two shows in Atlanta on Aug. 28 and 29, a show in Asheville on Aug. 30, and a Sept. 20 show in Chicago. Who is Ethel Cain? Ethel Cain is a Florida-born singer-songwriter, producer and model. She's known for her genre-blending sound that mixes alternative and dark pop, indie rock and folk. Her debut record "Preacher's Daughter" rocketed Cain to fame when it debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard Top Album Sales Chat after its release in May 2022. Cain is the first openly trans woman to have a top 10 album on the Billboard 200. Cain's played festivals and shows around the world, hit the stage with Mitski and Florence + the Machine, and walked in N.Y. and Paris Fashion weeks with Givenchy, Miu Miu and Calvin Klein. What happened with Ethel Cain's resurfaced social media posts? In July, Cain came under fire when old social media posts resurfaced, containing racist and misogynistic themes, among other offensive jokes. Cain released a lengthy apology statement, saying that during that time she had been trying to be as 'inflammatory and controversial as possible.' "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," Cain said. "Any way you feel about me moving forward is valid.' To learn more about Ethel Cain, visit Audrey Gibbs is a music journalist with The Tennessean. You can reach her at agibbs@ This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Ethel Cain midnight listening parties: Will Nashville have any? Solve the daily Crossword
Wall Street Journal
06-08-2025
- Entertainment
- Wall Street Journal
‘Willoughby Tucker, I'll Always Love You' Review: Ethel Cain's Next Chapter
Some songwriters report on their own lives, some grapple with geopolitical issues, and some find meaning in quotidian third-person storytelling. Twenty-seven-year-old Hayden Anhedönia, who makes music under the name Ethel Cain, builds worlds. She self-released her first EP six years ago, but the scope of her ambition came into focus with the release of her 2022 debut album, 'Preacher's Daughter.' One could draw a connection between certain songs on the record and an act as familiar and conventional as Taylor Swift—'American Teenager' was a tightly constructed upbeat number with radio-ready hooks, delivered in the singer's soaring, windswept voice. But 'Preacher's Daughter' was a Southern Gothic epic with long songs and interlocking stories about doomed love, shattered families and small-town violence. It was a work designed to be taken whole, an album you inhabit. 'Preacher's Daughter' was the kind of lore-filled cultural object seemingly assembled for an obsessive cult, and Ms. Anhedönia acquired one rather quickly. Her personal story—she was raised in a conservative Southern Baptist family in and around Tallahassee, Fla., and came out as trans and changed her name when she turned 20—strongly informs her music, connecting with fans who feel like outsiders themselves. But her finely rendered songwriting transcends biographical details, and one needn't know anything about her backstory to appreciate it. Her second song-based album, 'Willoughby Tucker, I'll Always Love You' (Daughters of Cain), out Friday, is an extension of its predecessor's storytelling universe that demonstrates Ms. Anhedönia's marked artistic growth. This progression is evident from the opening 'Janie,' a drumless ballad that begins with a bass-heavy drone before an ethereal guitar and wisps of synth fall behind the singer's ghostly voice. The sonics are richer and her melodic confidence is more assured compared to her earlier records, which deepens the song's simple story of a relationship that has withered away. Ms. Anhedönia is often compared to Lana Del Rey, particularly in her penchant for extended narratives and a David Lynch-like fondness for darkly surreal Americana. But unlike Ms. Del Rey, the younger artist produces her own music, writes songs on her own, and plays the majority of the instruments on her recordings. By controlling every aspect of her music including engineering and mixing, she finds just the right sonic backdrop for each narrative, and she intersperses songs and instrumentals. The second track, 'Willoughby's Theme,' which moves from quiet and spare piano to surges of electric guitar and drone, suggests she has a future scoring films, if she so desires.
The Guardian
24-07-2025
- 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.
