Is America Ready for Ethel Cain?
The Church of the Pop Fringe
The Florida panhandle is an uncanny realm. True Detective’s first season, the one about the unsolved murders of young women in a southern delta community, was filmed some 500 miles dead west, but its unsettling story feels like it could have happened here. Murky swamps and endless backwoods. Antler horns and big tent church revivals. A sense of something untamed and primordial. Floridians say it’s the only place where you travel north to go to the Deep South.
Ethel Cain was born and shaped in a small town called Perry within these confines. The twenty-three year old singer/songwriter recently relocated to an even smaller town in rural Indiana (she lives in a 19th century converted church now), but the haunted feel of the Big Bend region continues to inhabit her sound — an ethereal intersection of American Gothic and the failed American dream. Cain’s multi-layered, choral vocals and dark, drowsy guitar soundscapes have earned her comparisons to a variety of artists from Enya to the Cure to rap producer Clams Casino. She sounds like each and precisely none of these influences, all at once.
“Knuckle Velvet” from her 2019 dream pop EP Golden Age was ostensibly about either a $2000 clutch purse or an engorged clitoris. It also had a gorgeous heartland twang that Taylor Swift would kill for…
