Ethel Cain – Nettles

With thanks to Brian, Ethel Cain marks her very first Jukebox appearance…

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[8.43]Brian Hsiao: Hayden Anhedönia performs as a fictional character by the name of Ethel Cain, who exists as a creative vessel for discussion of Anhedönia’s experiences as a small town trans woman with a Southern Baptist upbringing. “Nettles” continues the tragic love story from the perspective of a deeply traumatized woman who strongly grasps onto her lover as she suffers through sentiments of worthlessness and loss. It’s the fastest 8-minute experience of my life that will be turned into a 45-minute experience when I see my therapist next week.
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Claire Davidson: Ethel Cain’s 2022 album Preacher’s Daughter is the kind of underground sensation I’m all but certain will go on to become one of the definitive albums of the decade, so confident is its harrowing scope and unflinching pathos in depicting a gruesome Southern Gothic vision. That project would be a tough act for anyone to follow — no less considering it was Hayden Anhedönia’s debut album under that moniker — and, indeed, it took her some time to arrive with a conceptual sequel to Preacher’s Daughter, preferring instead to release the experimental drone project Perverts first in January 2025. Nonetheless, Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You, Anhedönia’s formal follow-up within her larger canonical project as Ethel Cain, would eventually arrive in August of that year, and I’d honestly struggle to say it’s on par with Preacher’s Daughter. Don’t get me wrong, Anhedönia remains one of the best music producers working today, but the album’s depiction of a tragic teenage love story in the rural South is short on detail when compared to its predecessor, undermining some of its melodrama until the album’s climactic final two tracks. Still, outside of those final two tracks, “Nettles” is probably my favorite song on Willoughby Tucker, not just because it’s Ethel Cain’s most overtly country track to date — which is surprising, given how much of the Ethel Cain project has centered rural Americana since its inception. Anhedönia is a natural at using twangier textures to conjure her signature atmosphere, taking a full minute and a half to gradually develop the song’s sonic palette before commencing with the lyrics. That deliberation yields gorgeous results, as the cello, fiddles, and woozy whine of pedal steel creak with such a heaviness that they sound as if they’re rising from the gnarled woodland earth that serves as this song’s backdrop, before the addition of some banjo strums adds a wistful warmth to the picture. This tonal contrast proves appropriate for the song, too, where Anhedönia tells the story of a young couple whose romance comes to a head when the man involved is injured in an industrial plant accident, leaving him permanently disabled and forever jaded in the years to come. That the two characters spend their time in the hospital headily wrapped in each other’s arms is a morbid contradiction unto itself, but Anhedönia spares no details in highlighting the darkness that awaits these two characters once they eventually leave: the woman in question is clearly coping poorly with trauma inflicted on her by local boys, and the man is alternately fascinated and terrified by his own capacity for violence. The deep intimacy that these characters share in providing a reprieve from these insecurities is so visceral that it’s almost uncomfortable to hear, so obvious is the disaster that clearly lies in their wake. That the song should sound so lovestruck while chronicling this journey is both spellbinding and heartbreaking. To love me is to suffer me, and I believe that. 
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Joshua Lu: The lore behind Ethel Cain’s projects makes for an interesting read, but when listening to her, trying to connect individual moments to the overarching narrative needs to come secondary to just experiencing the music. As the lead single from Cain’s latest album, “Nettles” carries a lot of narrative heft, relaying the story of the fictional Ethel Cain conjuring an image of her lover’s demise. It’s a fantasy within a fantasy, ripe for multiparagraph Genius annotations (which are there and are worth reading), yet ignorance of this backstory doesn’t preclude the ability to enjoy the song as it is: a lush dreamscape slowly distorting around you, perpetually threatening to fade to black, as Cain muses tenderly about the nature of love and loss. It’s the kind of song that makes you surrender to it, until you emerge out of the other side with a sense of something different inside yourself. The literal story can’t compare to the raw emotional impact of the song.
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Ian Mathers: I continue to consider Perverts the best record Cain released last year, but that doesn’t mean the one with more songs on it is any less gorgeous, or devastating.
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Nortey Dowuona: Most of us suffer resentfully in silence. The fear of facing the truly inevitable brings up emotions of resentment since it builds from first, fear: the fear of death, second: the hate of that fear, finally: the sadness at our hate. Inevitably the ruthless passage of time on this planet renders all irrelevant. Most of us simply choose to try and place fearsome assemblages in our lives to make us indomitable, immortal, impossible. Ultimately, this becomes a waste and a mistake, Since life is lived by a human with other humans. and once another human is gone, even our hate fades and the fear returns. Willoughby was a human, a friend, a son. He was killed by the inevitable violence that comes from the aforementioned fears, and now Ethel has to continue to exist in a world where she now knows all this, and has to lay this at the feet at, God forbid, one who will use this against her, one who will refuse to understand and run and worst of all, one who happily wanders into the nettles and sits with her, the blood dripping from their legs and palms, yet still must leave. Did Willoughby know that “to love me is to suffer me” before he met Ethel? How much was that on his mind as he lay dying? Not as much as the agony and frustration tattooed on his face before his life was ended, leaving Ethel to commit it all to memory; and ultimately in silence.
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Alfred Soto: She sounds like The Weather Station’s Tamara Lindeman but she forgoes brevity for the kind of pace and narrative that makes one look for words like “leisurely.” When I pay attention to the lyrics, I can understand the devotion, but for the most part “Nettles” doesn’t earn its leisure.
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Will Adams: Ethel Cain’s tendency to move at a glacial pace can be hit or miss. It works better on a song like “Thoroughfare,” where its expansiveness works both narratively (Cain moves out west with her love) and structurally (centerpiece of the album that transitions to its brutal back half). “Nettles” isn’t as lyrically dense, so it runs the risk of sagging, but it is still gorgeous, a love song yearning to escape the trauma that shadows both of its subjects.
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