Hayden Anhedönia wanted to make films. But like so many girls from small-town America, her ambitions outpaced her means. Instead, she wrote music: atmospheric, genre-blurring, and (crucially) low-budget songs that could soundtrack a séance. Ethel Cain, a character in her imagined cinematic universe, became her musical alter ego and the protagonist of Preacher’s Daughter, her 2022 debut. Anhedönia didn’t need Hollywood backing to style herself as an auteur: She wrote, performed, and produced her songs largely alone, while cultivating a camera-ready tradwife-meets-trucker aesthetic. Unguarded about the scope of her dreams, she echoed one of her most obvious forebearers when, in 2021, she said that she wanted hers to be the “next great American record.”

Preacher’s Daughter was billed as the first installment of a trilogy following three generations of women—Ethel Cain being the youngest—in a Southern evangelical setting with evident parallels to Anhedönia’s own upbringing in the Florida panhandle. The story, a grisly travelogue, is pocked by familial trauma, perverse sex, even cannibalism. Its somewhat tamer new prequel, Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You, has a younger Cain ensnared in a teenage love triangle with the title character and death. Sprawling as it is, the project, so far, coheres around its defining theme of fragility—of life, of love, and of the American dream.

You’d be forgiven for not getting all of that just from listening. While loaded with backstory, these records subsist more on ambiance than on plot. Anhedönia, often classified as a pop artist, gravitates equally—and on Willoughby Tucker, increasingly—to sludgy slowcore and dusty, sepia-toned folk; to sounds that are laggy and distorted, like dinged-up records played at the wrong speed. (For a more extreme application of this interest, see Perverts, the ambient album she released in January.) Her characters are illuminated in lightning bolts of imagery rather than in continuous tracking shots: The love interest on “Dust Bowl” is a beautiful and tortured “natural blood-stained blond” who takes her to see slasher flicks at the drive-in; elsewhere, Cain languishes in a stale, mildewy bedroom and in pallid hospital light. In the darkness between these flashes, Anhedönia smears drones and lap steel and tape crackle and cardiac monitor beeps into murky abstraction.

And then there’s “Fuck Me Eyes,” Willoughby Tucker’s second single. A tender, colorful character study of a teenaged town harlot, the song features some of Anhedönia’s sharpest writing (“Three years undefeated as Miss Holiday Inn”) and most maximal production—all twinkly ’80 synths and booming percussion—as it probes the gap between desire and acceptance. Sonically, it’s a headfake, a play she’s run before: “American Teenager,” the arena-ready single from Preacher’s Daughter, is similarly at odds with its context. On its own, “Fuck Me Eyes” is captivating. In situ, it has the feeling of a box ticked—the legible pop song that exists to justify the unmarketable creative choices surrounding it.

This would sound like an overly cynical read had Anhedönia not spoken candidly about how much business shapes her work. “This is my livelihood… I do have to find the compromise of, we put out an album, I tour it, I make a pop song or two,” she said in a recent interview with The New York Times. In her music, there’s a related and ongoing negotiation between her desire to connect with listeners and her desire to challenge them. For all its conceptual scaffolding, the story of Ethel Cain is a fundamentally human and accessible one, about navigating love and betrayal; actually hearing it out, though, can feel like an endurance exercise, or a test of faith. Songs on Willoughby Tucker routinely stretch past six minutes. One (“Waco, Texas”) runs to 15, without a discernible chorus or other structural signposts. The pace is glacial; the palette funereal.

There is no pleasure without pain; as the Lord rejoiced over you to do you good, and to multiply you, so the Lord will rejoice over you to destroy you. The uneasy coexistence of beauty and torment defines Willoughby Tucker: “To love me is to suffer me,” Anhedönia sings in her gorgeous, breathy murmur on “Nettles,” a slice of pastoral folk. In the song, Tucker has sustained a critical injury from an industrial accident, and Cain imagines their future together in a moment of fleeting fantasy before reality sets in. With its lush imagery and sweet delusion, it reminds me of John Everett Millais’ painting of Ophelia drifting downstream before drowning. Drowning, fittingly, describes the impression of “Willoughby’s Interlude,” the stormy instrumental that immediately follows—an extended mash-up of drones and what sounds like someone breathing heavily in an adjacent room.

But perhaps the most interesting frictions in the Ethel Cain universe play out not in the music but in the relationships between Ethel Cain, the character; Hayden Anhedönia, her author; and their shared audience. With growing celebrity comes growing scrutiny, as Anhedönia recently learned firsthand when offensive old posts of hers circulated online. The incident challenged an expectation, common among a subset of pop fans, that singers be beacons of moral clarity. Anhedönia can’t—and shouldn’t—be expected to lead us into the light. Still, I want more from her than darkness. There’s something a bit too obvious about the way the coastal media class has embraced her grim, sweeping visions of rural America. It’s simpler, I guess, to peer at the red heart of the country in spooky diorama form—validating our assumptions about the bleakness of life there—than to, say, talk to a Republican.

I thought about this while listening to the album’s closer, “Waco, Texas.” (This is the 15-minute one; the mind wanders.) The title is loaded, but Waco turns out to be more signifier than subject—a kind of shorthand for the themes of religious zealotry and violent demise that recur in Cain’s catalogue. (Early demos of this song circulated online in 2022, before Donald Trump held his first 2024 presidential campaign rally in the city.) Anhedönia seems to be reaching for a grandiose concluding statement, but it’s a modest couplet that really sticks out: “I’ve been picking names for our children/You’ve been wondering how you’re gonna feed them.” An economic marvel, it’s packed with more hope and dread and disaffection than the whole quarter-hour of material surrounding it. You don’t need to shoot the big-budget film, it turns out, when a home movie will do.