Ethel Cain’s relationship with pop is nearly as complicated as her relationship with God. Inspired by her restrictive upbringing in a rural Southern Baptist community, the songwriter Hayden Anhedönia, born in Tallahassee and now based in Alabama, introduced her stage persona on her breakout EP, 2021’s Inbred. In its songs, she presented herself as a kind of American gothic Lana Del Rey, with a flair for lurid prose about hateful sex and violent impulses. Split between dreamy, contemporary pop and brutalist, witchy dirges, the EP left uncertain whether Cain, then 23, was setting out for cult stardom or actual stardom. At times, like the opening single “Michelle Pfeiffer,” she seemed to be campaigning for total TikTok saturation; at others she sounded as if she might retreat permanently back into the woods.
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