Christians can be devils, too. It’s a bold statement. I am a Christian myself, yet Christians, or members of any religious groups, can still be mean people—or even “devils.” The cloak from God doesn’t deter the fact that a Christian is still human, susceptible to their vices and sins.
These were the initial conclusions I came to from listening to the debut album Preacher’s Daughter by Hayden Silas Anhedönia–better known by her alias Ethel Cain. Preacher’s Daughter is a narrative album: the album presents a depressing collection of ballads spilling her ordeals with religion, identity, and love through the lens of Ethel Cain’s alter ego, trying to stay afloat in a small Southern Christian town. She struggles with her transgender identity, harassment, and religious trauma; she is later murdered by her lover. Ethel Cain highlights the difficulties of being queer, especially when born into a strong religious environment where modernized acceptance is rare. Some- times, these situations don’t always produce positive outcomes.
I read a fair amount of books, and it astonishes me how Preacher’s Daughter narrates one of the best stories I’ve ever read and truly grasped. The character of Ethel Cain is an unreliable narrator. But by her unreliability, we understand the depth of emotion that Anhedönia brings. Throughout the album, her trauma and personal entanglements were laid out before our eyes, as she tells us why she felt so out of place. When her father died as a pastor, she had to take up the role in her town. Yet, she is not sure if she believes in the word of God that she utters every Sunday. In songs like “Family Tree” and “American Teenager”, she wishes that she weren’t tied to her family bloodline and was just a “normal American teenager”–not having to worry about confessing her love differently or struggling over her identity being a sin as a pastor. In the song “Hard Times,” Ethel reflects on her abusive father. Behind the glorious image of the town’s renowned pastor, he beat his daughter for being queer. The lines “doing all of the things that you do/And I still do/And that scares me,” tell us that Ethel buried her problems and tried to be the replicated epitome of her father, yet, at the end of “Hard Times”, she finally decides to let go of what she isn’t.
In the second half of the album, we meet Isaiah, the character of Ethel’s lover, a control freak and malicious troublemaker. Their relationship ultimately led to Isaiah murdering her, though with unclear intent, cutting her apart, and storing her in the freezer, as shown in the songs “Ptolemaea” and “Sun-Bleached Flies.” The second major part of the album resonates with love. Love is an over- powering emotion; Anhedönia in her Ethel Cain persona wanted to show that it can be so surreal, but also a wolf in sheep's skin. After the death of the Ethel Cain character, Anhedönia asks God: if He loved Ethel, and why did He not save her? Why does she feel so frightened and lost, she wonders, even in the presence of God? Anhedönia’s illustration of the wretched, human proneness to our mortality, volition, and ideals makes this album a lyrical epitome of a tragedy.
When I listen to this album, I feel like I ascend into this epiphany–this intangible moment when I’m lost in music. Many artists can curate songs that can transport you into their musical realm, but not many artists can construct an album of this sort. Preacher’s Daughter is an intricate composition of electric guitars, eerie piano, and other instruments, and her high notes are truly transcendent. Anhedönia’s genius manipulates your conscience in the first song, and from then on, you are a puppet to her hypnosis; you are overwhelmed by whatever feeling she depicts and whatever feeling she evokes. You are stuck in reverie, and that’s just what’s so amazing about this album. You don’t need to focus on the lyrics to feel what it’s putting down on the table. She captures these inexplicable feelings through her songs. Prime examples of this are the songs “August Underground” and “Televangelism.” Though it has no lyrics, “August Underground”’s haunting humming captures the pulchritude of death, and “Televangelism” feels like a mind of nothing, drifting with no purpose. Preacher’s Daughter is a sedative to your inner turmoils–a brief, ephemeral euphoria.
If you feel open-minded, Preacher’s Daughter deserves your auditory organs; if you want to experience profound art in music, Preacher’s Daughter will check that box; if you want to cry and be weird, Ethel Cain has predicted your motives and written Preacher’s Daughter just for you. Music is such a complex piece of existence, and this album shows you the beauty in such complexity.