Ethel Cain: mud-churned Southern Gothic songs of the first order

Ethel Cain’s fans appear to have interpreted the title of her current live run — the Childish Behaviour Tour — as an actual instruction. Recent shows have been blighted by crowd misbehaviour, so much so that before her second sold-out date at London’s Roundhouse, the Florida singer-songwriter — real name Hayden Silas Anhedönia — administered a teacherly warning on Instagram: “Barreling to the front, slapping people’s hands away when I reach for them, verbally insulting people, it’s all just not very nice.”

It seems surprising that an artist who makes swampy, introspective songs informed by her strict Southern Baptist upbringing should inspire such rowdiness, even if her fans are the particularly intense kind who wait outside venues from 6am. On Monday evening, the Camden audience formed a queue as long as that for Lorde’s show in the same venue two years ago.

But the warning apparently worked. This crowd were as respectful as churchgoers, by turns solemn and adoring, many dressed like a blend of Grant Wood’s American Gothic couple and Virginia Woolf: long prairie skirts, ribbons, lace. Cain opened with a mangled rendition of the Victorian hymn Nearer, My God, To Thee, followed by her new song, Dust Bowl, shot through with an enormous drumbeat that evoked the open road, freeing and claustrophobic at the same time.

The drums were an almighty presence all night, as was Cain’s voice. On stage, the 26-year-old was a gentle yet commanding presence: Lana Del Rey at her moodiest and least coquettish. A mud-churn of Americana, country, and rock, spangled by feral guitar and spectral pop vocals, her music sounded exactly like the product of an oppressive religious upbringing. (Anhedönia left the church when she was ostracised for being gay. She later came out as a transgender woman.)

Images of wooden porches, sun-bleached vistas and Cain sprawling Andrew Wyeth-style in long grass flickered behind her. Anhedönia wanted her Ethel Cain alter ego to be “the poster child for what I feel is the casualty of being an all-American girl” — an ambition felt clearly on Preacher’s Daughter, her 2022 debut concept album about small-town suffocation and family trauma. Warped by TV static and streetlight hum, its long songs sound as if they’ve been filtered through gauzy net curtains. They take place on dirt roads and dirty mattresses, with lyrics that possess the religion-haunted slant of Southern Gothic writers like Flannery O’Connor and Carson McCullers.

These songs inspired the Roundhouse crowd to worship. They belted out refrains such as “God loves you, but not enough to save you” on Sun Bleached Flies, and clapped along to Cain’s harmonica and tambourine during Thoroughfare, a track which moves from from country strum to full-throated rock. Even more rousing was Cain’s encore cover of Bette Davis Eyes, a 1974 Jackie DeShannon track that Kim Carnes turned into the kind of enormous pop hit Cain shies away from — which made it a genius setlist choice. It bled straight into American Teenager, the heartland anthem that nudged a reluctant Cain into the limelight. Ethel Cain may be the poster child for the casualty of being an all-American girl, but it’s clear Hayden Anhedönia has no desire to become the poster child for the casualty of being an all-American pop star.

Touring over summer. Tickets: daughtersofcain.com/tour