Preacher's Daughter

Preacher's Daughter is the debut studio album by American singer-songwriter and record producer Ethel Cain, released on May 12, 2022, via her own record label, Daughters of Cain. It is a concept album that creates a narrative inspired by the artist's personal life as the daughter of a deacon and centered on fictional characters. Sonically, it experiments with folk music, Americana, slowcore, and other genres. The album was preceded by the release of three singles between March and April 2022: "Gibson Girl", "Strangers", and "American Teenager".

Upon release, the album was met with acclaim from music critics for its production, cohesiveness, storytelling, and songwriting, and many of them named it as one of the best albums of the year. It has also gained a cult following. To promote Preacher's Daughter, Cain embarked on her first two concert tours, the Freezer Bride Tour in 2022 and the Blood Stained Blonde Tour in 2023, through North America, Europe, and Oceania.

Background
Hayden Silas Anhedönia developed an interest in music at a young age as being involved in a church choir while her father was a deacon; it was her first exposure to music. She began studying classical piano at age 8, and her early influences were a variety of Christian music. She left the church at the age of 16. Two years later, at the age of 18, after leaving her religious family home in Florida, she began her transition process and started writing her debut studio album.

In 2017, she released "dreamy bedroom pop" demos of songs under different monikers. Her first official release via streaming platforms was the extended play (EP) titled Colossus, in 2017, under the moniker Atlas, later changed to White Silas. With the latter, she released four more extended plays, between 2018 and the first half of 2019. In that year, she began her main project, Ethel Cain, with the EPs Carpet Bed and Golden Age. After gaining prominence by releasing her third extended play under the moniker, Inbred (2021), especially with the song "Crush", which is "more of a pop song than her usual alternative style", the singer announced the release of her debut studio album, titled Preacher's Daughter, on March 17, 2022.

Composition
Preacher's Daughter is a slowcore, Americana, folk, ethereal, and goth-pop album with influences from dark ambient, heartland rock, classic rock, cock rock, sludge, gospel, industrial, noise, horror-electronica, country and drone.

Writing for The Guardian, Shaad D'Souza described Preacher's Daughter's composition as: "Touching on hazy ambient music, gothic country and doom metal, many of its songs stretch out to the 10-minute mark, with no choruses or discernible hooks. Its calling-card single, American Teenager, is a heartland rock anthem that feels indebted to Taylor Swift and Bruce Springsteen, but most other songs, like the pulverising Gibson Girl or the glacially paced Thoroughfare, seem to exist at the intersection of Lana Del Rey, the ambient folk artist Grouper, and Godspeed You! Black Emperor at their most grinding."

Concept and songs
It is a concept album that draws on the artist's personal life as the daughter of a deacon, but creates a narrative "centered around the character Ethel Cain, who runs away from home only to meet a gruesome end at the hands of a cannibalistic psychopath." Drawing loose inspiration from her personal life, Anhedönia has stated that she was "possessed by the persona of Ethel Cain" after experiencing hardships of her own - such as coming out as gay, trans, and leaving her church and family. The story is told over thirteen tracks, the first of which is introductory and features spoken word, as well as lines from track five, additionally adopting the name of that track. "Family Tree (Intro)" opens with a distorted recording of a Southern preacher, foreshadowing the religious themes to come, as well as ideas of intergenerational trauma and how the actions of your predecessors can affect your present life. "American Teenager" is a heartland rock, country rock, and ambient pop song led by synths and guitars that tells of teenage American nostalgia and conveys strong anti-gun sentiment. "A House in Nebraska" is an eight-minute torch song featuring "angelic melodies, layers of reverb twisting around each other with dizzying clarity" and ends with an arena rock guitar solo,. "Western Nights" is a pop rock song about "a woman and her Harley-riding boyfriend crossing state lines, on the run from their past and still bearing family traumas." "Family Tree" blends sludge and outlaw country as Cain "reveals the deadly agency her persona wields" as she reckons with "a genealogy marked by violence on all fronts". "Hard Times" is a bedroom pop song wherein "Cain admits to fearing how badly she wants to emulate the fatherly authorities in her life who brought her harm". "Thoroughfare" is a country-inspired epic that "replaces the intensity of electric guitars with swelling vocals, reverberating drums and a cathartic whimsy," ending with a tambourine and scat singing jam session. "Gibson Girl" "achieves a delicate mix of sultry and haunting" with its "American-gothic eroticism" that shows the faults of the American Dream, ending with another stadium rock guitar solo.

The album's climax "Ptolemaea" is an industrial doom metal song named after the ninth circle of Hell in Dante's Inferno that houses Ethel Cain's namesake. "Horrifying and awe-striking", Cain "holler[s] with horror and anguish just as the guitars plunge into disarray and the occasional blast beat appears." The preacher from the intro returns to speak distorted incantations for the Daughters of Cain and "their whore mothers". After "Ptolemaea" comes two instrumental tracks, "August Underground" and "Televangelism". The former is a doom-ambient track with low-register guitars and siren vocalizations that is "meant to represent Cain’s attempted escape from, and ultimate death at the hands of, her murderous lover". "Televangelism" is a piano-led piece drowned in reverb that, towards the end, becomes swallowed by tape hiss, highlighting the "artificiality" of televangelism and "allegorizing [Cain's] ascent to heaven. "Sun Bleached Flies" is a country power ballad  that "wrestl[es] with the contradictions of organized religion" Album closer "Strangers" is influenced by hair rock and grunge that ends in "a swarm of energetic chaos", with Cain now a "freezer bride" in her killer's basement and being cannibalised as she sends out one final message of love to her mother.

Singles
Alongside the album's announcement, on March 17, 2022, Cain released the lead single of the album, "Gibson Girl". The following month, "Strangers" and "American Teenager", the second and third single respectively, were released, with the latter gaining an accompanying video published in July.

Live performances and tours
To promote the album, Cain hosted album release shows in Los Angeles and New York City, on May 18 and May 25, 2022, respectively. She also performed live on KEXP, and at WNXP's Sonic Cathedral in Nashville, Tennessee. As part of Vevo's DSCVR Artists To Watch 2023 series, the singer recorded live performances for the album tracks "A House in Nebraska" and "Thoroughfare".

In June 2022, Cain confirmed via social media that she would be kicking off her first concert tour across the United States, titled the Freezer Bride Tour. Weeks later, she announced several dates across Europe; in the United Kingdom, Germany, Netherlands and France. She also embarked on the Blood Stained Blonde Tour in 2023. It marked her Coachella Festival debut. Cain also performed at various festivals such as Pitchfork Music Festival, Vivid Sydney, and Reading and Leeds Festivals, and was a supporting act for indie rock band Florence and the Machine's Dance Fever Tour, American singer Caroline Polachek's Spiraling Tour, and American indie supergroup Boygenius's The Tour.

Critical reception
Preacher's Daughter received a score of 82 out of 100 based on eight reviews from media aggregate site Metacritic, indicating "universal acclaim". In a five-star review for DIY, Ben Tipple wrote that Cain "has an unparalleled power to drag you into her world" and called her "an autobiographical embodiment of escape, and of a fresh start". Jessie Atkinson of Gigwise named Preacher's Daughter "an American epic" and that "Ethel Cain is only 24 and has already written something as striking and with as much potential for cultural impact". Crack writer Emma Garland called Cain's voice "resplendent and seemingly infinite in register, and transforming this landslide of beauty and suffering into some of the most fearless songwriting in recent memory."

Devon Chodzin of Paste, wrote that "where one may knock some of the power ballads for sameness, one might instead find consistency, an album grounded in the artist’s inspirations and narrative mission that is, above all, tantalizing. It is hard not to crave more." The Line of Best Fit contributor Paul Bridgewater called the album "thematically a reckoning of salvation and oppression, all played out across the battlefield of religion and love. It's an ambitious undertaking for a first album, but Cain's success largely comes down to embracing the universal language of pop as her mother tongue and keeping a deft hand over all aspects of her work, as both songwriter and producer." Clash writer Oshen Douglas McCormick called it "a heart-wrenching collection of songs that urges the listener to give themselves over to this album as much as Ethel Cain gives herself over to you."

In May 2022, Preacher's Daughter was included on Pitchfork list of best new albums. In the following month, it was listed as one of the best albums of the year so far by Gorilla vs. Bear. In July 2022, Paste named "American Teenager" the best song of the year so far, with contributor Jacqueline Codiga describing it as "a deeply felt portrait of a doomed, yet hopeful character" and writing that it "has the stadium-sized scale, relatability and ambition to become the biggest song in the entire country". Rolling Stone included "American Teenager" on its list of the most inspirational LGBTQ songs of all time.

Track listing
All tracks written and produced by Ethel Cain, except where noted.