Hayden Anhëdonia is a grasp mythologist. Because the creator of Ethel Cain, pop music’s reigning undead goth princess, she signaled a vibe shift away from the nonstop millennial moralism of the Trump 1.0 period and towards one thing darker, sicker, and extra immersive. Her 2022 debut Preacher’s Daughter is among the decade’s real left-field hits — probably the pop cult success of the 2020s, as long as Chappell Roan now not counts as a cult hero — and the only “American Teenager” stays a stirringly subversive spin on post-Taylor Swift coming-of-age anthems. In an period the place “empowerment” and “trauma” grew to become overused buzzwords in album PR bulletins, Anhëdonia stood out with songs drenched in cannibalism, homicide, and sexual perversity, amongst different transgressions.
There are, nonetheless, limits to her virtuosic prowess for spinning stunning BS. As an illustration: In a latest interview, Anhëdonia claimed that she watched Twin Peaks whereas making her new album, Willoughby Tucker, I’ll All the time Love You. Nothing stunning about that — few musicians of her technology are higher fitted to the adjective “Lynchian” than Anhëdonia. Nonetheless, she insisted that this was her first time watching the long-lasting tv sequence. And, I’m sorry, however even within the fanciful world of Ethel Cain, that assertion strains credulity. It can be like if Quentin Tarantino declared that he caught his first Scorsese film simply final week.
Then once more, it’s potential that Anhëdonia hasn’t studied Twin Peaks as intently as I assume. Together with co-creator Mark Frost, David Lynch pulled off two very totally different feats with that present. On one hand, he crafted one thing wholly in contrast to something on tv, a meditation on ethical corruption and small-town secrecy that indulged fearlessly in atmospheric and semi-subliminal visible abstractions. Alternatively, Twin Peaks additionally labored as conventionally satisfying tv, with well-written characters and a compelling thriller that captured the cultural zeitgeist. To make a musical analogy: Twin Peaks functioned as each an experimental ambient document and an simply accessible pop tune.
Hanging that excellent stability has been a problem for Anhëdonia — if she’s really concerned about that stability. “American Teenager” proved that she’s able to dominating the “simply accessible pop tune” lane, and Willoughby Tucker equally frontloads the pair of fascinating singles launched previous to the album launch, “Fuck Me Eyes” and “Nettles.” The previous monitor is one other variation on the “Sizzling Subject Taylor Swift” vibe of “American Teenager,” with cinematic lyrics a couple of lusted-after sweetheart who “goes to church straight from the golf equipment” and “seems to be similar to her mama earlier than the medication.” (Like Lana Del Rey, Anhëdonia can play with redneck tropes in a way that each highlights their camp silliness and red-meat Pavlovian resonance.) The latter tune, in the meantime, kind of resembles an easy country-pop ballad, albeit one laced with spectral synth traces performed on the identical keyboard utilized by the late Twin Peaks composer Angelo Badalamenti. (It additionally options the album’s greatest storytelling lyric: “We have been in a race to develop up yesterday / By right now, ’til tomorrow / However when the plant blew up, a chunk of shrapnel flew and slowed that a part of you.”)
Whereas these songs have been used as teasers to attract listeners to Willoughby Tucker, they aren’t actually consultant of the general document. “Mud Bowl” is extra indicative — a glacially paced temper piece skilled on a sadomasochistic relationship dynamic (“I knew it was love / When I rode house crying / Pondering of you fucking different ladies”), it’s noticeably stingy on the subject of doling out dynamic musical morsels. It unfolds largely as an unchanging block of sound, the place the looks of a distorted guitar riff on the tune’s midpoint seems like a drop of water in an arid desert. It hits laborious, however it’s not sufficient.
Anhëdonia’s albums are by no means missing for backstory. She’s described Willoughby Tucker as a prequel to Preacher’s Daughter that delves into the Ethel Cain character’s titular highschool sweetheart. As she explained to The Guardian, it’s set in 1986 (5 years earlier than Preacher’s Daughter) and considerations the teenaged Cain “attempting to navigate her old flame in a damaged world in a damaged city.” The issue is that the story is far clearer when Anhëdonia talks about it interviews than whenever you’re listening to her music. As is the case with all idea albums, the particulars of the plot matter lower than speaking a sure essence to the listener. And on Willoughby Tucker, that essence usually appears hazy and never absolutely baked.
I wrote favorably about Cain’s earlier launch, the 90-minute so-called EP Perverts, which arrived in January as a strident anti-fame provocation. Nonetheless, I admired it extra as a gesture than as music — her willingness to tweak the expectations of her viewers felt brave given the aggressive push for pandering fan service in all corners of streaming-dominated media. However after Willoughby Tucker, I’m beginning to marvel if she has a misplaced sense of the place her strengths lie. Quite a lot of her new album, supposedly the “pop” follow-up to the experimental EP, offers in the identical type of elongated instrumentals that populated Perverts. Between them, “Willoughby’s Theme,” “Willoughby’s Interlude,” and “Radio Towers” drone on for practically 20 minutes, regardless of having severely restricted melodic concepts. What’s worse is that she additionally saddles her pop songs with that very same room-tone bloat, seemingly out of the misguided perception that it makes her music extra profound or momentous. Album nearer “Waco, Texas,” for instance, would have been a wonderfully good energy ballad if it lasted eight minutes (about so long as “November Rain”) as a substitute of 15. However on Willoughby Tucker, extra usually means much less.
As soon as Anhëdonia will get over her Twin Peaks part, I hope that somebody can level her to a different basic of teenaged angst and monumental dread, Disintegration by The Treatment. Like David Lynch, Robert Smith has a present for larger-than-life romantic doomerism. Like Hayden Anhëdonia, he additionally loves lengthy, scene-setting instrumentals, like Disintegration‘s entry level “Plainsong.” However the primary motive why Disintegration grew to become a part of the “cool bizarre child” syllabus is that it additionally has a number of hit singles, together with “Lovesong,” “Footage Of You,” “Fascination Road,” and “Lullaby.” It’s unrelentingly bleak and extremely tuneful. Anhëdonia has already proven a capability to make songs that sound simply as large. I simply want she would enable herself to do it extra usually.
Willoughby Tucker, I’ll All the time Love You is out now through Daughters Of Cain Data. Discover extra data here.
