Ethel Cain has shared some demos from her latest record, ‘Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You’. Check them out below.
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The artist – real name Hayden Anhedönia – released the album back in August, saying it would “close the chapter” of the ‘Ethel Cain’ character in her career.
Now, she’s unveiled demos from the record. On New Year’s Eve, she took to Instagram to share that she’d be closing out the year by uploading the tracks to SoundCloud, writing, “Thank u all for the love on perverts and my little blood stained blonde this year. until whatever’s next…. goodnight.”
The demos include two different recordings of ‘A knock at the door’ and ‘Tempest’, as well as ‘Willoughby’s Interlude’, ‘Nettles (Miserable Demo)’, and ‘Shrug (Janie Demo)’. You can listen here.
She’s also added short reflections on each of those demo tracks. Under ‘Nettles (Miserable Demo)’, she writes “2023 was a tough year”, while under ‘Shrug (Janie Demo)’, she explains that the song “was originally going to be from willoughby’s perspective as well. dust bowl was going to transition directly into it. i wound up reworking it a bit to be about janie.”
She also wrote that when it came to ‘A Knock At The Door (Demo I)’, a lot of the lyrics from those demos “got shuffled around until they found their homes”.
“i wrote all three versions of this song in the same day and picked my favorite version two years later while finishing the record,” she explained. “it wound up being the simplest version in the end, but i think these two versions elaborate a little more on the story. that might be why i avoided them, thinking they were too on the nose idk. i like all three versions a lot.”
Following the release of her EP ‘Perverts‘ last year, Anhedönia also shared demos from the project.
NME attended her recent show in London’s Hammersmith Apollo, and in a four-star review wrote: “Anhedönia conjures the slightly campy, vaguely spooky atmosphere of a B-movie graveyard, and performs the majority of the show from within her mossy altar, which comes complete with theatrical backlighting and a crucifix mic stand. A show exceedingly light on stage patter, the few words she does exchange with the crowd are unshowy, and more or less invisible to most of the room.”
NME awarded ‘Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You’ five stars, writing: “On the closing track ‘Waco, Texas’, Ethel accepts a life of nothingness, though she still anticipates the tiniest possibility that Willoughby could ever return to her. It’s a seemingly hopeless conclusion, but the raison d’être of this album isn’t nihilism – it’s the pure, devotional love that Hayden Anhedönia holds for her protagonist, even through her suffering. If this truly is the end of her story, it’s hard to imagine a more heartfelt way to lay Ethel Cain to rest.”
The album also landed at Number 46 in our roundup of the 50 Best Albums of 2025, with the entry reading: “On her second record, Hayden Anhedönia orchestrates a collision of the storytelling of her already seminal debut ‘Preacher’s Daughter’ with the experimentalism of her divisive 2025 EP ‘Perverts’. Moments of lyrical tenderness brighten murky, distorted sounds, as she once again cements herself as one of the sharpest songwriters of her generation.”
