Fans of Ethel Cain wait in anticipation for the drop of her newest album, Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You, since it was announced in March. Luckily, we’ve been given a little snippet of the album to tide us over, in the form of a new single.
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Nettles sets the mood for the album’s overarching narrative as a continuation of the story in Preacher’s Daughter. Willoughby Tucker will be the second installment in a planned trilogy of albums, with each installment told from the perspective of different generations of women in a family led by a religious preacher.
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Willoughby Tucker is about the preacher’s wife and tells the story of her and a love interest she had before meeting the preacher.
From this and the song’s lyrics, we are given a full narrative in Nettle, a song in which a young girl and a boy both from very rough homelives deciding to run off together in their teens. They’re drawn together because of their shared inexperience and traumatic upbringings. Eventually, the boy suffers what seems to be a workplace accident at a plant that leaves him in the hospital dying. Soon after this, the girl, stricken with grief, leaves to supposedly drown her sorrows and ends up getting accosted by a group of men.
If you look deeper into the lyrics, however, the song can take on several different meanings.
When it comes to Ethel Cain, her songs can usually be grouped into two categories: scary, ambient hymns (Ptolemaea.) and soft country ballads (House in the Country) With Nettles, the instrumental layout is of a Southern Gospel country variety with a hint of Appalachian folk through its incorporation of the violin and church organ that make up the rhythm. Cain’s angelic voice gives weight to the emotional narrative, almost as if she’s using her singing to act in a movie or play.
Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You is set to release in August of this year. Some fans are waiting in anticipation, while others are skeptical as to whether this album will prove a worthy successor to Preacher’s Daughter. If Nettles is anything to go on, this album holds a chance at topping the previous success and making way for the rest of the trilogy, though only time will tell.
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