Recently, I’ve been listening to Ethel Cain’s, a.k.a. Hayden Anhedonia’s, new EP titled Inbred.
The artist grew up in a southern Florida cult, and makes music from the perspective of a Baptist preacher’s wife in an 1800s rural southern town. The brooding reverb, dark lyrics, and classic rock influences create contemporary iterations of Gregorian chants, and her songs continue to impress me with their depth and lyricism (especially considering the fact that Anhedonia writes, sings, produces, and masters them herself).
There are certainly comparisons to be made to Lana del Rey: the dark, rich sound of the vocals, the nature of the lyrics (men, sex, domestic abuse, and the phrase “my baby”), the complete lack of uplifted-ness. But Ethel Cain is to the nineteenth century what Lana del Rey is to the 20th. Lana’s aesthetic is Coca Cola and cherries, seductive and moody with 1920s Great Gatsby imagery of exorbitant wealth. She interrogates us about what America was, and what it can be: old money, new money, sex, dreams, heartbreak, all in the frame of the transition from modern to post-modern America. However, while Lana del Rey looks at America through rose-tinted glasses, at the creme-de-la-creme and the woes of being a beautiful woman, Anhedonia examines what America actually is: poverty, violence, hard drugs, domestic violence, and religious trauma run amok.
In an interview with Hero Magazine, Anhedonia comments on the comparison herself: that “Lana is all facade, she is glamour, she is old Hollywood, she is the peak opulence of the American Dream…. That’s not what America is to me. I think America is the bottom line—it’s the poor people, the people who have been the most affected by the government, by the system…For me, the American Dream is not real… peel away the Lana American Dream of Marilyn Monroe, the American flag. America is the people who never get a break.”
So, Ethel Cain maintains Lana’s undertones of darkness, sexuality, and lust, but recontextualizes it into her own Southern-Florida background to create a morbid menagerie of religion, drugs, humidity, self-harm, and decrepitude. She incorporates the American Gothic into the Southern United States to create Inbred, a cohesive, thoroughly magnetic body of work that maintains the same eerie charisma throughout.
“Unpunishable”, a powerful rock ballad to scream in your car, is a personal favorite. Written from the perspective of a “used and abused” prostitute in the nineteenth century South, Cain croons about sexual violence over an addicting Lynyrd-Skynyrd-esque guitar line. “Two Headed Mother” is also really compelling; it sounds like murky marsh waters realized into a moody, bass-heavy alternative rock song.
Listen to Inbred on Spotify or other major streaming platforms! Link to the Hero Magazine interview here: https://hero-magazine.com/article/189013/ethel-cains-music-is-an-unforgiving-portrait-of-southern-baptist-america/
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