7 Ethel Cain: Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You

You’ll keep changing
I will stay the same
And turn the page
To find it blank
Except for my last name

Janie

Fucking hell, liberals, enough with the purity tests!!

[EDIT: Sorry, but I went to bed last night hating this post. I just feel it was all over the place, undecided on what to focus on, dipped its toes into saying something more important but wimped out of it when I was worried that it wouldn’t come across how I hoped it would, then the post just garbled about nothingness. I wanted to say things that were thought provoking and interesting, but just ended up with milk toast nothingness. I’ve left the final couple of paragraphs, plus the amazing lyrics, but the rest of this post can get to fuck. I’ll take another swing at the topic I chickened out of another time in the future. Fucking incredible album though]

Three years undefeated as Miss Holiday Inn
Posted outside the liquor store ’cause she’s too young to get in
They ask her why she talks so loud 
“What ya do with all that mouth?”
Boy, if you’re not scared of Jesus, fuck around and come find out
She’s got the radio blasting with her big white smile
Pretty baby with the miles
And when she leaves, they never see her wiping her fuck me eyes

Fuck Me Eyes

Liberals’ incessant purity testing – their insistence that anyone who hasn’t had an entirely spotless life so far without any mistakes, and whose views on absolutely everything aren’t considered entirely correct and progressive may as well be sucking off Donald Trump for the benefit of Jeffrey Epstein – is an absolute fucking gift to the right wing. While the right always likes to point at a thousands of year old book and say “Well this fictional character said we should do this” and then don’t do most of the things that those dumb books say anyway, Liberals instead have this imagined book of almighty sins and moral wrongs that they seem to follow… like… biblically

Lay me down where the trees bend low
Put me down where the greenery stings
I can hear them singin’
“To love me is to suffer me”, and I believe it
When I lay with you in that auld lang room
Wishin’ I was the way you say that you are
You’ll go fight a war, I’ll go missing
I warned you, for me, it’s not that hard

Nettles

It’s why the right often focuses on Trans issues, because it is absolutely the most Purity Tested area of modern discourse, and it osten ends up deteriorating real opposition into uselessness. Nobody on the centre or the left wants to put Trans people in detention camps and force their detransition; nobody over on this side wants to ban the letter ‘T’ from schools in case children get a little too curious in the dictionary and end up being transed; and we have little time for people complaining about losing a fucking skateboard competition. We all agree that there is no problem with people identifying with a different gender than the one they were assigned at birth! There, that’s the end of the debate, we can now concentrate on far more important things like seizing the means of production. Instead, too many of us are trying to cancel people for accidentally misgendering people or for attacking women including former sexual assault survivors for questioning (understandably) whether self-identification should be enough to be allowed into women-only spaces. There are debates to be had here – that should be between women – but until then a difference in opinion on what is an insanely minor issue should not disqualify someone from the wider fight. Remember that all gender is fucking garbage. Trans people are discriminated against, women are opressed.

Grew up hard, fell off harder
Cooking our brains smoking that shit your daddy smoked in Vietnam
You’d be a writer
If he didn’t leave all his hell for you
Saying if you could, you’d leave it all
I knew it was love
When I rode home crying
Thinking of you fucking other girls
But when you
Said that you’re in love
I never wondered if you’re sure

Dust Bowl

We’ve also entered an extra worrying phase where anything you’ve ever said at any point in your life can and will be used against you.

Satan’s in the state penn
You’re here with both your fists
And you’re not scared of no knock on the door
Everything I’ve loved
I’ve loved it straight to death
So I’m still scared of that knock on the door

Knock at the Door

On July 6th 2025, a Twitter account that claims its goal goal is EXPOSING ETHEL CAIN (!!!!!!!!) posted screenshots of things Ethel had posted online in the past. ‘In the past’ as in they were fucking 19 years old. I’m sorry, but that’s a child. I know, they might be able to get into the cinema to watch ‘Nymphomaniac’ (Volume 1 and 2) and buy Ashfield Lager if she’s in, say, Northampton at the time, but are you seriously saying that if I introduced 19 year old Ethel Cain to you as my fat 42 year old arse’s new girlfriend your response would be “Oh good, Franchise has found himself an adult girlfriend will a fully formed brain who I’m sure is not at all open to being groomed”? No you would not! Or at least you didn’t the last time I introduced you to my new 19 year old girlfriend. You just immediately assumed that she was a sex worker! Which, OK, yes, she was, fair play to you there.

This weird Twitter account also posted a homemade shirt that Cain posted herself wearing which, I dunno, is pretty fire and they should probably sell in the official shop.

Please, just go easy on me
I am young and naive
I don’t know what I need
“I can lead you to bed
But I can’t make you sleep”
I’ve heard it before
From someone who leaves
I still dream of violence
Angry at the waiting game
Chain link on your lungs
And sulfuric acid in my brain
Don’t ask me why I hate myself
As I’m circling the drain
‘Cause death, it takes too long
And I can’t wait, ah-oh

Tempest

Anyway, this fucking dumb 19 year old – because everyone is dumb when they’re 19 years old, if you weren’t it was probably autism – makes jokes about rape, fat people, being racist and even (brace yourself)reblogged a still from thefilm ‘American Honey’ where the actor Riley Keough wore a Confederate Flag bikini!! Fuck, I was all ready to forgive Cain, but they’re practically throwing Sieg Heils and declaring themselves members of the Groyper Army. That reblog didn’t happen to feature fourteen words, did it?? A classic social media pile on erupted, after everyone decided that Ethel Cain was actually worse than Hitler and had the Nuremberg Files to prove it. One of the promotional photos used for ‘Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You’ was actually inspired by a real missing person poster!! For shame!! There was a photo of her playing with a dog, and… like… her tiddy rubbed against it a bit… Animal Abuser!!! BEASTIALITY!!! For shaaaaaaaaame!!! Begone, foul witch!!! Regardless of how dumb this all was, and regardless of the fact that every ‘edgy’ joke Cain made was an obvious ill-fated attempt at humour that very much should have eyes rolled at it (seriously, I’ve written worse. This year. Month. Today, probably) but nothing more, Ethel Cain was compelled to come out and apologise.

To start things off, I want to address the Twitter/curiouscat screenshots. That was my account and they were my words. I was 19 and I was entirely aware of what I was saying and that was why I said it. I spent my later high-school years being extremely progressive and “SJW” as they called it at the time, as a way to reject the indoctrination of my environment and rebel against the prejudice, hatred, and ignorance of the culture I grew up in.

After moving out of my parents’ house, I fell into a subculture online that prioritized garnering attention at all costs. I flip-flopped again, rejecting all notions of my former “cringe SJW” behavior and intended to be as inflammatory and controversial as possible. I would have said (and usually did say) anything, about anyone, to gain attention and ultimately just make my friends laugh.

I could tell you that I had no idea at the time the platform I would have in the future, or tell you I just have a dry and extremely sarcastic sense of humor, or make any other kind of excuse, but there’s no place for excuses in this matter. At the end of the day I am white, so while I can take accountability for my actions, there’s no way for me to fully understand the way it feels to be on the receiving end of them. All I can say is that I am truly sorry from the bottom of my heart, to anyone who read it then and to anyone reading it now. Any way you feel about me moving forward is valid.

Transcribed on Stereogum

Listen, Ethel Cain, I really do appreciate the thought you’ve put into this and how aware you are of your status as a white person perhaps making these things a lot less easy to rationalise, but… I think there’s a a huge place for excuses in this matter. Chief among them the fact that this was more than a decade ago and you were a dumb child. Were these things bad? Absolutely, and Cain should absolutely feel an unholy amount of shame for ever making the jokes under the assumed pretext that they would only ever be received as such. Are they so bad that she should never be allowed to forget them and should be hounded with her own idiocy for the rest of her life?? Fuck no!

Do things exist that do carry that kind of deserved punishment? Probably, yes, especially if they aren’t married with genuine attempts to deal with those wrongs in the perpetrator’s later life. Is posting stupid shit when you’re a teenager one of those things?? Fuck no! Get your heads out of your arses, Liberals, no wonder you keep getting beat by literal Nazi paedophiles.

Yeah, you’ve changed, but did I ever know you?
Or did I hold you facing away from me?
The air in your room never moves
Live and die by the TV no one’s watching
Do you hate me?
When this is over
Maybe then, we’ll get some sleep
I’ve been picking names for our children
You’ve been wondering how you’re gonna feed them
Love is not enough in this world
But I still believe in Nebraska dreamin’
‘Cause I’d rather die
Than be anything but your girl

Waco, Texas

‘Willoughby Tucker…’ though? God-damn it’s fucking amazing. 74 minutes of absolute musical bliss peppered with some of the most beautifully constructed examples of one of the greatest lyricists working today. Low on the big radio friendly hits (I don’t think Obama’s list will be troubled this year) but huge on wide screened emotion and powerful instrumentation. I was wondering whether ‘Perverts’ – the drone/ambient EP Cain released at the start of the year which was in my honourable mentions – was going to be Ethel Cain getting all of her experimentation out of her system before her proper follow-up to 2022’s ‘Preacher’s Daughter’ swung hard for the pop/rock fences in search of a huge breakthrough hit album. However, if anything ‘Willoughby Tucker…” is ‘Preacher’s Daughter’ fed though the ambient prism of ‘Perverts’, creating something a lot more patient, a lot more epic, a lot more of a slow burn than anything she’d previously released, becoming totally its own wonderful thing.

Quick! Go look for photos of her punching an otter or slagging off Wallace and Gromit or or visually not enjoying ‘One Battle After Another’ or something do you can Tweet them all out when she releases her next album! Oh, but Ethel! How could you not love that movie though?!

2023 #8 (+1, slow and steady wins the race)

AOTY: 83

At 84, ‘The Users’ rated it even higher, but do I wanna see these comments?

No. I did not want to see them.

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