Willoughby Tucker, I'll Always Love You
by Ethel Cain

released: 08/08/2025
runtime: 73:35
genres: slowcore, singer-songwriter

review written: 20/12/2025
listened: 16x

★★★★⯪

Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You is the long-awaited follow-up to Ethel Cain (Hayden Anhedönia)’s debut album Preacher’s Daughter. Set in 1986, Anhedönia’s character Ethel Cain is again the protagonist of this record, but this time we are given more of a backstory of Ethel’s teenage love, the titular Willoughby Tucker. A hazy and nostalgic slowcore record, Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You sounds like the perfect blend between Anhedönia’s two previous works. Taking the more accessible (though still absolutely drenched in reverb) sound of Preacher’s Daughter, and adding much more ambient and drone influences that we’ve seen her use on Perverts. The songs range from the 80s synthpop-inspired ‘Fuck Me Eyes’ (Anhedönia said that she was pressured to have a ‘pop song’ on the album similar to ‘American Teenager’ off Preacher’s Daughter) to no less than three instrumental tracks; ‘Willoughby’s Theme’, ‘Willoughby’s Interlude’, and ‘Radio Towers’. Every song on this album is perfectly placed, and clearly has a purpose in adding to the story, be it more obviously through lyrics, or adding to the atmosphere and instead telling a story purely musically as the three instrumental tracks do.

‘Willoughby’s Theme’ is Anhedönia’s favourite track off the album. Sonically, it’s inspired by Angelo Badalamenti's ‘Laura Palmer’s Theme’ from Twin Peaks, and it tries to capture the dizzying experience of falling in love with someone, knowing it will forever change you. It sounds like the natural progression of ‘Televangelism’ off her previous album, with its reverb-heavy beautiful piano melody leading the song, but this time with much more ambience surrounding it, creating a hypnotic atmosphere that you can truly get lost in. The other instrumental tracks are similar: ‘Willoughby’s Interlude’ closes out the first half of the album, showing the progression of Willoughby and Ethel’s relationship after ‘Nettles’, while ‘Radio Towers’ takes a darker turn as a reworking of a scrapped song off Perverts, foreshadowing that Willoughby will soon leave Ethel, either by dying or due to some other reason.

Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You dives deeper into Ethel’s insecurities. The opening track ‘Janie’ is about Ethel’s fear of losing her only friend Janie as she enters a relationship, and ‘Fuck Me Eyes’ is all about how Ethel compares herself to Holly Reddick, a promiscuous classmate who, to Ethel, is the embodiment of all she will never, and can never, be (“I’ll never be that kind of angel”). She expresses jealousy towards Holly as she assumes Willoughby loves her (because, to Ethel, Holly is the perfect girl while Ethel is deeply flawed), while also saying “I’ll never blame her for trying to make it”, as she empathises with Holly and recognises that even she has struggles. Similarly, ‘Nettles’ ends with the absolutely heartbreaking lyric “to love me is to suffer me”, sung quietly after the rest of the song has faded away as Ethel compares herself to nettles, stinging those around her.

‘Dust Bowl’ is halfway through the album, and I think does a wonderful job of showing the relationship between Ethel and Willoughby. It’s different from a lot of the other songs on the record which are much more about Ethel’s internal thoughts, as it paints a picture of Willoughby’s actual love for her as told by his actions: “His eyes all over me”, “You tried to wade in/’Cause you wanted just to tell me who you were.” Around halfway through the song, the instrumentation explodes as Anhedönia sings “Cooking our brains/Smoking that shit your daddy smoke in Vietnam”. It’s a really powerful moment, and Anhedönia’s live version only elevates this. She performs the song with the stage in hazy red dim lighting, as she is backlit by a strong white strobe light, so all we can see is her silhouette as she stands behind a cross. We are effectively Willoughby here, and Anhedönia is Ethel, as she sings “but all you could see was me”.

The line “I’ve been picking names out for our children/You’ve been wondering how you’re gonna feed them” from the 15-minute closer ‘Waco, Texas’ shows the very gendered divide of Ethel’s life. It is Willoughby’s job to financially provide for the family they imagine they will have together, and Ethel’s destiny to be a housewife and in turn, provide for him. She expresses anger at this in ‘Nettles’, singing “I wanna bleed, I wanna hurt the way that boys do” as she longs to be allowed to be angry in a way forbidden for women, especially for Ethel as the daughter of a preacher. This song ultimately shows the destruction of the two characters relationship, as Willoughby leaves her due to his own struggles, which are explored more in the second half of the album as their relationship develops. Not only is their relationship destroyed, but so are Ethel’s perhaps naïve ideas of what love means and her whole outlook on life, as Willoughby meant to the world to her (and clearly still does at the time of her death in Preacher’s Daughter).

I think the key lyric of this album is “this was all for you” from ‘Nettles’. It’s a true example of how Ethel thinks and how she tells us of the way she interacts with the world at the time of this album. It would be a mistake to consider her a reliable narrator – everything about her fundamentally comes back to her adoration of Willoughby, though it often clouds her judgement. Anhedönia describes the record as “one long love song”, which I think is both a description of Ethel’s feelings towards Willoughby, but also in the way that Anhedönia was inspired by instrumental, drone, and ambient music when making this record. Each song cannot be considered just by itself. Lyrically and sonically, every song is contextualised by every other song on the album, creating an amazingly cohesive record. The same can be said with the way it interacts with Preacher’s Daughter: understanding Ethel’s backstory further contextualises her later in life, and knowing how Ethel’s life ends in Preacher’s Daughter only serves to make listening to Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You an even more heartbreaking experience, as we know that not only is their relationship doomed from the beginning, but so is Ethel’s whole life. This is what makes Anhedönia such a brilliant songwriter; so intentionally telling stories to perfectly craft the story that she wants to tell. This is a true masterclass in what a concept album should be.

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