There is a tornado at the heart of Ethel Cain’s new album, Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You, a storm of such Southern Gothic biblical proportions that it rivals the foreboding flood that heralds the foretold birth of Elvis and his dead twin on Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds’ “Tupelo.” The tempest rolls in slowly before its eponymous song, arriving subtly on the instrumental “Radio Towers,” a hypnotic rhythm of narcotic synthy pulsating and distant prodding chimes that mimic the blinking pattern of the red lights on top of those romantically minimalist industrial radio towers, cut through with the piercing beep of a hospital heart monitor. In between these repeated boops and hums, the rushing of wind picks up, and a crack of thunder can be heard in the background, barely perceptible, like seeing a flash of lightning on the horizon. “Tempest” arrives with a grave, conclusive thrum of synth and piano. The storm is here.

“Do you hear them? The trains?” Cain, otherwise known as vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Hayden Silas Anhedönia, ominously calls, evoking the known train-like racket of a tornado, “Tempest”’s version of the Bad Seeds’ premonitory “Looka yonder! A big black cloud come!” Cain delivers these questions hallucinatorily slowly, her voice layered like an apocalyptic chorus, as if Enya stopped sailing away and started offering Lynchian weather reports. “Pick your flowers,” she continues. “You’re too late.” The wind howls, and wailing synths blare like tornado sirens, pitched up and distorted by the storm. Oh, shit. The lyrics transition to the song’s narrator rather than the omniscient choir, presumably the voice of the teenage character for whom the album is titled, Willoughby Tucker. As Chelsea Wolfe-like doom metal guitar strums, Tucker speaks of self-harm and crushing admission of naivete (“Please, just go easy on me. I am young and naïve. I don’t know what I need”).

The tornado hits with a bludgeoning wall of sound. The instrumentals mimic the feeling of being trapped inside the cyclone, a swirling mass of synths, piano, and guitar, as well as the constant presence of pounding drums that echo, like the sickening turns of the vortex. It’s so vivid that I can picture trees uprooted, roofs flying off of homes, pick-up trucks and trailers zipping by, and cows flying past. Is that Auntie Em on her bike?! All the while, Cain ethereally repeats, “Waiting for my end” or “Waiting on my own” (the latter of which Genius records as the lyrics, but I hear “end” much more prominently). Then, a pause. A breath. “I’m going to regret this…” Cain pleads. Another pause. “FOREEVEEERRR” The electric guitar wails as the twisty drums return, and I’m right back circling the middle of the storm with Cain repeating “Forever” for what seems like forever in this ten-minute song. And as far as I’m concerned, it could go on forever, a sublime listening experience to be at the center of. Yet, suddenly, the song collapses in on itself, in an ominous whoosh, like the tornado just sucked up Willoughby, the town, and the listener into the sky. To Oz.

Whew, what a ride! I want to become a storm chaser now. Besides my own new dangerous dream gig, “Tempest” just may be the best song Ethel Cain has ever recorded, maybe one of the best anyone has ever recorded, placing listeners in the churning morass of the storm. Now, is this tornado real? Is it an actual twister running rampant within the context of Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You’s album-long narrative, a budding teenage sweetheart romance turned doomed, forever formative, traumatic love between Willoughby Tucker and Ethel Cain (the teenage character who I’ll call Ethel from now on because the boundaries between Ethel Cain, the musician, and Ethel Cain, the character are very confusing)? Or is it the metaphorical representation of the emotional storm raining destruction on the relationship with Willoughby picking up and leaving, or maybe offing himself, with all those suicide references? Maybe both. In either case, warning signs were brewing long before “Radio Towers” and Tempest.” Earlier, the instrumental “Willoughby’s Theme” begins as a sweet piano duet, with a second, softer piano in a higher key in the background, like the dance of early romance. The song, then, grows and surges into an overwhelming swell of multilayered drones. While this rush suggests the breathless overpowering experience of fated love, it also, in its uppermost pitch, takes on the familiar wail of tornado sirens, further emphasized by Cain’s references to Willoughby’s fear of the weather on “Dust Bowl” like an impending disaster that cannot be avoided.

With literary devices (foreshadowing!) and an expansive cinematic sound, like an ambient soundtrack to an imagined movie (it’s no mistake Cain wanted to make films before settling for the ease and accessibility of recording music herself), Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You is a transcendent, triumphant example of sonic storytelling, a fully realized narrative in album form. Though most of the album concerns the relationship between Willoughby and Ethel, the first song, “Janie,” is a sparse, melancholic plea to both a best friend who abandons Ethel and the boyfriend for whom Janie ghosts her (“I know she’s your girl now, but she was my girl first”). Not only is this song the one that features the Dolly Parton nod from the album’s title, whispered here in halting desperation rather than belting defiance, “Janie” prefigures many of the themes on the album: hopeless relationships (“I can see the end in the beginning of everything”; “It’s not looking good, but did it ever?”), loss, and continuing to be hung up on past childhood relationships, Foreeeeveeerrr. It also, with its grungy elements, dates the album’s action to the late 1980s/early 1990s, as well as recalls the minimalist “Growing Pains” on Cain’s first EP, Carpet Bed.

Beyond the realistically stanky description of a mildewy room (someone open a window!), listeners don’t know all that much about Janie. However, other characters on the album are remarkably fully formed, from Willoughby as a “pretty boy” with holes in his sneakers, who may have been a writer if he hadn’t been fucked up by his Vietnam vet daddy, as heard on “Dust Bowl,” or the subject of “Fuck Me Eyes.” “Fuck Me Eyes” is a spin on Kim Carnes’s “Bette Davis Eyes,” which Cain covered last year at her Central Park Summerstage show, long before JoJo Siwa put on those Wilma Flintstone pearls and Jean Harlow wig, to croak out her own version mid-recloseted psychosis. With prominent nostalgic synths that remind me of, surprisingly, The Weeknd, “Fuck Me Eyes” is a white trash character study of a heavily made-up beauty, a “Miss Holiday Inn,” with “her hair up to God,” a girl who “really gets around town.” All puffed-up, ragged toughness merged with trash religiosity (my favorite line on the album: “If you’re not scared of Jesus, fuck around and come find out”) and red nail polish shine, she mooches booze off of letches outside the liquor store and acknowledges how much she’s like her drugged-out mama (“She’s no good at raising children, but she’s good at raising Hell”). However, she’s also secretly terrified, lost, and lonely. Told from the perspective of Ethel and her ambivalent feelings (“I’ll never blame her, I kinda hate her. I’ll never be that kind of angel”), you know exactly who this character is: Laura Palmer (I demand many YouTube tributes!). And I’m not just yet again finding more excuses to make Twin Peaks references. For Willoughby Tucker, Cain sought out the exact synths that Angelo Badalamenti used for the show. These sonic resonances can be heard not only on “Fuck Me Eyes,” but also in the dark space low synths at the end of “Willoughby’s Interlude,” which sound like the beginning of “Laura Palmer’s Theme.” I can just picture those Twin Peaks traffic lights swaying in the breeze as Laura runs into the woods one last time.

As a writer rather than a musician (though a music lover above all else, really), I’ll admit I tend to fixate on lyrics first. Just the hot and heavy drive-in horror flick scene at the beginning of “Dust Bowl” tickles my fancy, leading me to whisper “Eighth grade death pact, strike me dead” to myself when listening to the album in public. Yet, the strength of Willoughby Tucker isn’t just in the lyrics alone, but in the perfect symmetry between the lyrics and the music, including the range of musical styles. In addition to tornado siren whines and cyclone whirls, Cain experiments with earthy Americana country worthy of Emmylou Harris with “Nettles.” Set against the backdrop of some horrible industrial accident, wistful “Nettles” sees Ethel ricocheting between envisioning her halcyon post-wedding day future with Willoughby when she will no longer wake up alone and realizing that she just might get in the way of this dream (hence the prickly nettles). With prominent banjos, fiddle, and pedal steel guitar, the music itself is a warm backwoods fantasy, mirroring the idyllic imagery of their imagined house (“Gardenias on the tile, where it makes no difference who held back from who”) that is only disrupted by her repeated warning: “To love me is to suffer me.” Cain even uses her voice to further emphasize the narrative–the multiple layers of vocals on “Nettles” like a round of one, or the squeaky Nicole Dollanganger-esque childlike tone she takes on “A Knock at the Door,” abandoning her typically crystaline angelic resting pitch for a reminder that this Ethel character is still a kid.

None of this is that unusual for Cain, nor is she the only one to do it (This tight coming-of-age story has some resonance with PJ Harvey’s I Inside the Old Year Dying, if Polly grew up in a Florida trailer park rather than with the white chalk hills of Dorset.) Cain’s 2022 album Preacher’s Daughter is also a concept album that flawlessly balances crushing lyrics and dreamy, on-point thematic music (not to mention her E.P. Perverts’ descent into chilly wrrr-ing masturbatory drone wave hell). For instance, I keep thinking about how perfectly “Sun Bleached Flies” mimics the sound of praise hands-waving megachurch Christian Contemporary music, as dead Ethel makes her final acceptance. Plus, Preacher’s Daughter’s nagging flies that swarm around the twangy warped “Family Tree” and the nightmare-in-song-form “Ptolemaea” mirror the ever-present yowling tornado sirens and heart monitors on Willoughby Tucker. The two albums have more in common than repeated sound effects, though. Willoughby Tucker is the prequel to Preacher’s Daughter, making both albums even more devastating in context. Can you listen to Willoughby Tucker without thinking about Ethel’s transformation into a murdered and cannibalized “freezer bride” (hence all those flies), a missing face on a milk carton by the end of the earlier album?

It’s not just the characters; storylines intertwine. This high school romance is still fresh in Ethel’s mind on Preacher’s Daughter, as evidenced by the melancholic “A House in Nebraska,” which reminisces about Willoughby and Ethel’s dirty mattress hideaway where they imagined their life together, a dream that is devastatingly returned at the end of “Sun Bleached Flies.” Nebraska (dreaming) comes up again on Willoughby Tucker’s final 15-minute tearjerker, the astonishingly wordy diaristic litany of Ethel’s regrets about this relationship (“Darling, time might forgive me, but I won’t”). “Waco, Texas” also contains many lyrical and sonic callbacks from earlier songs on the album, including the return of the now mournful pedal steel guitar from “Nettles” and repetitions of “Forever” from the prior track “Tempest.” After Ethel has her say, the song soars into an extended instrumental breakdown that then fades into a simple piano. It gets me like this every time I listen:

I can’t ignore the song’s title either, conjuring the image of Janet Reno’s Feds torching Branch Davidian cult kids alive.  Asked about the song’s title on Tumblr, Anhedönia explains:

“The events of the Branch Davidians/the [Waco] siege take place around the same time as Ethel’s life and death (i think the final standoff happened about two years after Ethel dies) but I always see the rise and fall as being parallel to her story. Yes, David Koresh was insane and also a pedophile so I’m not going to pretend I look up to him or something haha, but the story just always has intrigued me. As Ethel and Willoughby fall in love, they find themselves blinded to the rest of the world for a while, captivated by each other and thinking that love could keep them safe. But eventually, the real world comes knocking and everything goes up in flames. I just like the parallels of their relationship and the events of the Branch Davidians. Ethel sees him as being this beautiful, enamoring God and she’s deeply in love with him, but in the end she realizes he’s just a broken boy and they’re both too far gone. Idk, it’s just a corny little love drama that I’m way too deeply invested in and I’m drawing lines in the sand trying to pair it with a 30 year old cult siege lol. I don’t get out much!”

Beyond the comparison between obsessive devotion sliding into destruction, Waco, Texas holds a spooky place in the American imagination, at least if you’re very interested in creeping, murderous federal government overreach and U.S. citizens’ propensity for cult brain decisions like I am. Coupled with the title for “Dust Bowl,” Cain evokes events when the American promise has just completely fucked its people. And its people are fucked on Willoughby Tucker. Cain depicts a world of American deterioration, even before our post-9/11, forever war, subprime mortgage, corporate bailout, Sackler, conspiracy lunacy, dementia president, AI data center, double Donnie 21st-century slide into a fading, unraveling, crumbling empire. Already on Willoughby Tucker, everyone is on drugs. Parents are barely there. There’s mildew and pewy shoes. Then, there’s the bitter twist of this still-relatable line on “Waco, Texas”: “I’ve been picking names for our children. You’ve been wondering how you’re gonna feed them.” Damn.

In a godawful review of Willoughby Tucker for Pitchfork, Olivia Horn snarks, “There’s something a bit too obvious about the way the coastal media class has embraced her grim, sweeping visions of rural America. It’s simpler, I guess, to peer at the red heart of the country in spooky diorama form—validating our assumptions about the bleakness of life there—than to, say, talk to a Republican.” Maybe Horn is the one who needs to leave her coastal elite bubble, because, although I’m not from the South, I recognize the “grim” rural America that Cain presents (backwoods PA is not all that different). Plus, I highly doubt Horn would say similar things about another great American storyteller who wallowed in America’s red ant-teaming darkness shot through with the beautiful voice of love: David Lynch. Well, David Lynch is dead, a fact that still stuns me when I think about it. And we—or maybe just I—desperately need someone to take his place. And with the brilliant, fully immersive, thoroughly American universe within Willoughby Tucker, I’ve found her.