Review Summary: Updating ethereal music for Gen Z, your new slowcore obsession has arrived
Ethel Cain is an enigma, the kind of artist whose music shouldn’t work on paper but who manages to create a unique world all her own which, once it reveals itself, becomes completely addictive. The brainchild of Floridian songwriter Hayden Anhedonia, Ethel Cain is a sort-of character through which the artist filters aspects of her Southern Baptist upbringing, combining dusty genres like slowcore and dream pop with a witchy atmosphere and appropriately Gothic subject matter but filtering them through a distinctly modern lens.
Inbred, Anhedonia’s third EP/mini-album as Ethel Cain, is her peak so far, and presents a fully-formed vision of an artist poised to take the music world by storm.
Inbred is best analyzed as two distinct halves, though the two work together to form a cohesive whole. While the first couple Ethel Cain releases, 2019’s
Carpet Bed and
Golden Age, were mostly nocturnal, the first half of
Inbred is a comparatively bright affair, three tracks that conjure a sun-drenched atmosphere despite their slow pace and often-depressive subject matter, all essentially perfect, addictive pop songs. “Michelle Pfeiffer,” a duet between Cain and emo-rapper lil aaron, invites the listener in with its slow guitar strums that give way to Cain’s sultry vocals, lethargic slowcore drums, and, eventually a glowing chorus. Even better is “Crush,” Cain’s most popular song yet and deservedly so, a delicious slow-pop nugget anchored by the lyric’s fascinatingly detailed character sketch and yet another absolute earworm of a chorus. A sort of bedroom pop stalker ballad (the key lyric: “Can you read my mind? / I’ve been watching you”), the song is the best representation of Cain’s penchant for writing about the darker side of obsession (“Good men die too so I’d rather be with you”), beating Lana Del Rey at her own game.
The oxymoronic sunniness of the EP’s first half concludes with the album’s centerpiece, “God’s Country,” an 8-minute ambient pop journey that effortlessly conjures images of wide open spaces. Centered around glistening, nostalgic sophisti-pop synths (and incorporating another emo-rap feature, this time from Wicca Phase Springs Eternal), the song drifts and builds to a gripping climax with all the grace of a post-rock song. Perhaps the most unlikely road trip song ever, the track encapsulates the feeling of driving purposelessly through seemingly endless highway roads with no one else around, young and angry at a world that doesn’t seem to understand you, representing the contradictions of small-town Americana as well as any country artist.
Things take a turn for the darker after “God’s Country,” the last three tracks being more representative of Cain’s prior work. “Unpunishable” is another tale of dark obsession, but much more visceral than what precedes it (the opening lyric: “Down bad and nasty / Sacrificial angel, dirty slut with needs”), with some psychedelic guitar work, droning bass, and of course Anhedonia’s soaring vocals adding to the allure. The following title track is even more f
ucked up, best representing the witchy images on the EP’s cover with a deeply nocturnal atmosphere, the obscure lyrics presenting a haunting sketch of a collapsing family focused around the narrator’s defense of her “White trash dick” older brother, the details of the song and its title implying that her care for him goes beyond the purely platonic. Like other tracks here, the song builds from near-silence to an explosive conclusion, the lyric “I’m not scared of God / I’m scared He was gone all along” encapsulating the dark contradictions that Anhedonia so loves.
While Anhedonia’s entrancing vocals and lyrics anchor much of the rest of the EP, final track “Two-Headed Mother” covers everything with a shoegaze haze, layering Anhedonia’s more mumbled voice atop itself and culminating in a wordless outro. While not as outwardly impressive or unique in its combination of styles as much of what precedes it, the track is nonetheless an effective conclusion for the EP that makes Anhedonia’s grounding in ‘90s indie styles more obvious.
Taken holistically,
Inbred is, simply put, a triumph. It’s certainly not for everyone, and it is a grower in the truest sense, but it sows its seeds in you immediately and keeps you coming back to it to make sense of its strange, alluring world, and at a slim 31 minutes, the EP is extremely replayable, especially those pop gems that make up its first half. Anhedonia’s characters feel deeply real, their self-destructive obsessions and their anger at God and the world perfectly encapsulating the melodramatic emotions of youth who struggle to reconcile their love of home with the oppressions that often come with it, especially for one like Anhedonia herself, a trans woman raised in a deeply religious setting. But the music is just as impressive, adding a modern sheen to genres in which other revivalists often seem content to settle for what’s been done before. Anhedonia has refined her craft here to create a fully cohesive vision that belies how early she still is in her career, and she deserves all the success that may come her way. One can only hope that what comes next will deliver on
Inbred’s massive promise.
