Today is Ethel Cain’s 27th birthday, and to celebrate, she fans a major announcement. Her second studio album, Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You, will be coming to fans on August 12th, along with a tour kicking off the same day.
We’re not even three full months in 2025, but it’s already proving to be a year of extreme existential dread. Cain’s release of Perverts earlier this year was only fitting. The album-length exploration of religious trauma and sexuality seemed like Cain’s way of announcing to the world that all this political intimidation is nothing to the nightmares she brings to the table. In short, it seems like 2025 is going to be her year, and anyone upset with the trans musicians is going to have to take a back seat and deal with it.
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Before the official announcement, she posted three images to Instagram with no caption
When viewed from her page they create a wide-shot portrait of a boy and girl in what appears to be a cotton field.
In true Cain fashion, this announcement is also layered with cryptic messaging “before everything, there was you. 1986, the year everything changed forever ♡”
“♡ W + E ♡”
From what we know, this album is supposedly a follow-up to 2022’s Preacher’s Daughter, the first in what Cain describes as a trilogy of thematically-linked albums. According to Cain, the story centers around three generations of women related to a preacher, moving from youngest to oldest, starting with the Preacher’s Daughter, The Wife, and finally The Preacher’s Mother.
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While it is certainly a departure from Preacher’s Daughter, there is much to enjoy about Perverts’ haunting nature.
From this, we can suppose the new album will be told from the narrative of the Preacher’s Wife.
It could be theorized that Willoughby Tucker is the name of the Preacher himself, or he could be a past love from before The Wife and The Preacher met.
The first half of the tour will take place in the United States starting in Seattle Washington on August 12 and ending in Chicago Illinois on September 20th. The 2nd half of the tour will take place in Europe beginning with Manchester England on October 2nd and wrapping up with Lisbon, Portugal on November 9th.
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