The gothic and its subsets can be found in many different places in media. Midwestern and Southern gothic are byproducts of the American gothic tradition, both forming their own unique genres tempered by the disillusionment with the idea of the fabled American Dream and/or the puritanical religious mindset that infects the country’s Bible Belt. Enter Hayden Anhedönia, better known under her stage name Ethel Cain, who is exploring the idea of Southern gothic through music with her debut full length album Preacher’s Daughter.The album’s cohesive storyline that follows Ethel Cain, the eponymous Preacher’s Daughter as she struggles to find her place in a hostile world while dealing with religious trauma, broken hearts, and the fickle promise of the American Dream.
Did I mention there is cannibalism as well? We’ll get to that in a second.
If you’re looking for something uplifting, move on. This is not the album, and Ethel is not the one to be peddling to you sickly sweet promises of American exceptionalism.
If Hayden Anhedönia doesn’t wind up providing a soundtrack and score for a horror film in the near future under her Ethel Cain act, it would be a shock because Preacher’s Daughter is a horror film of sorts. It’s a concept album in the same dark and dusky way Stranger Trails from Lord Huron is. There’s a story told that mines on the marrow of the gothic and the implosion of American girlhood. It’s brilliant, but it’s uncompromising as well. With tracks like “American Teen,” Anhedönia shows that she can produce the same poppy tinged nihilism that we all love, but it’s with tracks like “Ptolemaea” that lean deeply into the premise of obsession, dangerous men, and yes, horror. The seedy and lurid is mixed with the dark and divine.
The album’s narrative is reminiscent of a Sam Shepard play with all the trappings of melodrama, romance, and destruction. Through the avatar of Ethel Cain, Anhedönia spins a tale that errs on the side of caution. Lost loves and bad men abound in the early 1990s world of Cain. It’s a period piece, a new age sort of gothic for those who harbor not a nostalgia for the Victorian Britain of the Bronte sisters or the 1950s suburban hell of Shirley Jackson but the 90s that are more associated with grunge than horrific gothic odes to disaffected youth. Ethel is burdened with the fatalistic search for her place in the world, the fabled American Dream, while trying to be a good Christian since she is the daughter of a preacher. Her long lost love plagues her, and thus she yearns for what she cannot have.
Like the waifs from gothic fiction centuries before Ethel Cain and Hayden Anhedönia were ever born, the tragic figure of Ethel Cain falls in love again, falls on hard times, travels the world, and subsequently finds her ruin. Abusive men are at every turn, lurking behind every corner, waiting to take advantage of the young woman, and eventually, one of these men murders and subsequently cannibalizes the heroine we’ve come to love over the course of several songs. Cain’s story doesn’t end there; she sings to us from beyond the grave. The living cast of characters and the listeners are haunted by Anhedönia’s ethereal voice as she reaches across the planes of life and death to reflect on the sheer terror of her existence and her demise. The imagery created in the song “Strangers” is both mesmerizing and grotesque. Anhedönia toes the line of beauty and terror with this album, and there is nothing more gothic than creating an alluring sense of morbidity.
Vacillating from sexy to lonely to melancholic to lost to pleading to terrifying, Anhedönia spins a yarn that is captivating and delineated in an elaborate way. It joins the likes of media like Midnight Mass in that it is one of the best American novels you were never assigned in a literature class. The tale’s literary quality is stark, and while many music reviewers have noted a Lana del Rey like influence on Anhedönia’s music, she owes a lot to the disillusioned, discontent of poets, playwrights, and authors who paved the way for the album. Anhedönia is as much of a byproduct of writers like Nathaniel Hawthrone, Shirley Jackson, and Sam Shepard as she is Lana del Rey, though that comparison is dubious at best as Anhedönia manages to diversify her style and explore different styles of music all on the same album to tell the story of the doomed titular preacher’s daughter. It’s a heady melodrama for the ages in a twisty way that would make Emily Bronte, who also loved her tales of doomed young women and bad men, proud.
What makes this album an even more special entry into the larger canon of the gothic is that Anhedönia and her alter ego — or should I say altar ego? — Ethel Cain are both transgender women. Anhedönia uses can to interrogate her own experiences as a trangender woman and engage with the dangers that exist out there in the world for transgender women. Preacher’s Daughter is Anhedönia’s way of showing variation in trans narratives and turning away from stereotypes. Anhedönia revels in the mundane as much as she does the terror on the album. It’s refreshing to have a concept album that encompasses a trans character in such a rich and interesting way. Too often narratives featuring trans characters — sadly, mostly created cis people — are one note and do little to lend a voice to trans people. Anhedönia’s Preacher’s Daughter subverts the cliches while challenging fans’ ideas of the Southern gothic genre all the while translating the narrative into a musical magnum opus. Not to mention, I’m unsure if anyone — at least in the past ten years — has written a more beautiful song about being cannibalized than Hayden Anhedönia. I dare you to get the airy ghostly verse of the divine musical experience that is “Strangers” out of your head. Anhedönia proves that the gothic isn’t just the playground of cis creatives.
Preacher’s Daughter cements Hayden Anhedönia as a gothic storyteller in her own right. She’s created her own world, her own mythos that echoes the tragic tales of women that came before her. It’ll be interesting to see where storytelling takes Anhedönia and what dark delights await us. There is something truly gratifying as a fan of the gothic to see the genre and all of its forms spur on creativity in younger generations and embody spaces like music that others may never have dreamed gothic storytelling would flourish. I would say long live Ethel Cain, but she’s most assuredly dead, so for now at least, may she haunt our Southern gothic dreams.
Tags: Cannibalism, Concept Albums, Ethel Cain, Gothic Horror, LGBTQ+ Horror, Preacher's Daughter, Queer Horror, Southern Gothic, Unearthing the Gothic
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