Ethel Cain has launched ‘Nettles’, the first advance of his next album, ‘Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You’, which is put on sale in August. A ‘nettles’ model has been circulating on the Internet from 2021, and now the final version comes out.
‘Nettles’ is the door that opens the story of ‘Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You’, prequel of ‘Preacher’s Daughter’ (2022). If that album narrated the murder of its protagonist, Ethel Cain, at the hands of his cannibal partner, “Willoughby Tucker” travels to Ethel’s adolescence and his relationship with the character named in the title of the album.
Ethel Cain explained that, after the drama that occurred in ‘Preacher’s Daughter’, in ‘Nettles’ he wanted to return to “a moment of sweetness.” ‘Nettles’ is again full of dramatic and emotionally hard images (a hospitalized Willoughby, about to die; Ethel dealing with his personal traumas) but is, at the same time, the nostalgic memory of a beautiful relationship. The “greenery” of Southern America draws an idyllic landscape that contrasts with the suffering of both characters.
The sound of ‘nettles’ is equally serene and placid, whose composition fits the facet of Ethel Cain near the American and country. The instrumentation includes, in addition to guitar, piano and drums, banjo and Irish fiddle. With all these elements, Cain creates one of its prodigious ballads that undertake a long and enriching trip in which the image of the “ortigas” seems to symbolize the duality of love, that beauty that hurts.
Ethel Cain presents ‘Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You’ in Spain at the end of 2025. The dates – already exhausted – are November 7 in the Razzmatazz room in Barcelona and on November 8 at the Eslava Theater in Madrid.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sp0us82q1ck
