Ethel Cain’s Willoughby Tucker Forever Tour descended on Toronto this week, taking over the Queen Elizabeth Theatre for the first of two sold-out nights. From the moment the lights went down the atmosphere was, in true Ethel Cainian fashion, pure Southern Gothic. The stage resembled a swamp-strangled chapel. Branches dangling from the proscenium, shrubs standing in for altars, a cross for a mic stand. Fog seeped out like incense, the strobes slicing into it like lightning.
On this hallowed ground, Ethel Cain delivered Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You, the latest installment in her unfolding trilogy, and the second chapter in the saga that began with Preacher’s Daughter. What unfolded at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre felt halfway between concert and sermon; an alt-pop spectacle that balanced equal parts cathartic bombast and avant-garde macabre. The result was a liturgy in three acts, sealed with an encore that felt like a canonization of Cain as saint of a new echelon of artists dealing in all things Gothic Americana.
Act I: Birth
Cain opened her book of revelations with the prologue: Willoughby’s Theme, Janie, Fuck Me Eyes. These are the origin stories of Ethel Cain: first love, small-town jealousy, teenage dreaminess. Willoughby’s Theme arrived hushed and haunted, like a sepia-toned reel of 1986 flickering back to life. Janie followed, tender yet barbed, nostalgia complicated by rivalry. “I know you love her, but she was my sister first.” The line landed like a thorn caught under skin, a reminder that love stories in Cain’s world are never simple or easy. Fuck Me Eyes quickly snapped the room into a sharper focus. Cain, here, leans into small-town gossip, her delivery sly, almost playful: “She goes to church straight from the clubs / She looks just like her mama before the drugs.”
Act I felt like a series of tableaux like flickering films, whispered memories, scandals ensconced in neon light.
Act II: Death
Dust Bowl warped into something almost incantatory by the mic’s distortion. Cain’s voice, soft and gravel-edged, stretched into something poetic. “Grew up hard, fell off harder / cooking our brains smoking that shit your daddy smoked in Vietnam” her voice silky, carrying across the room as droves of fans raised their phones in anticipation of what was to come next. Reaching Vietnam, the word echoed and split, electric guitars and drums crescendoing rapturously as strobes behind her erupted in violent succession. It’s a moment that stands as a testament to Hayden Anhedonia’s ability to cultivate emotion and sensory experiences that range from slowcore ambient soundscapes to audio-visual catharsis of the highest calibre. It was the kind of moment that felt like a conjuring.
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At the start of Punish, Cain dropped to her knees and began to bow, over and over, each motion hitting on the beat like a body caught in trance. The strobes snapped in time with her movements, freezing her mid-fold so the audience saw her body jaggedly collapse again and again. Noise from Housofpsychoticwomn seeped through the song like static interference, pulling the performance toward rupture. The repetition of her bowing felt like choreography and like compulsion. It was stark and ritualistic. The moment was a perfect encapsulation of Ethel Cain’s idiosyncratic draw, and part of what makes her music and persona so magnetic and arresting, she is both pop star and purveyor of a certain Gothic dread that is distinctly her own.
During the refrain of Onanist “it feels good, it feels good, it feels good, it feels good” gathered force, each repetition pulling harder, her voice rising through distortion. The strobes rattled the theatre into seizure-light, Ethel’s wailing voice quite literally a siren coursing through distorted electric guitars almost seizing with the ecstasy of possession. Then the final strike: everything dropped into a wash of crimson, smoke thick and glowing as the song collapsed, a low humming drone filling the space.
Act III — Reflection
Radio Towers hummed like static prayer. The song’s distorted piano and languid droning pads were a welcome reprieve after the audio-visual cacophony that preceded it, leading into Tempest which swelled slowly, the storm drew out rather than unleashed all at once and Cain’s voice rode the build like a warning siren.
By the time she reached Waco, Texas the night had shifted into something quieter and more haunting, like Cain was singing from the other side of the veil. The song’s 14 minute runtime stretched long and heavy, not in a rush to resolve, the room held in suspension. “How much of a cruel year can you call my fault? Not even the memories are immortal.” The last track on Willoughby Tucker, a paean to grief, ended the album’s chapter on a sombre reflective note. And yet, even in that fatalism, Cain still holds onto the dream: “But I still believe in Nebraska dreaming.” It was longing for a house that never came, a future she never got to meet.
Encore — Communion
A House in Nebraska was the gut-punch of the encore. Cain pushed her voice further than anywhere else in the set: “I lie to her and saying that I’m doing fine, but really I kill myself to hold you one more time, and it hurts to miss you, but it’s worse to know…” She tilted the microphone toward the crowd and they answered, shouting “THAT I’M THE REASON YOU WON’T COME HOME” back at her like a choir. It was the sort of moment that cements Ethel Cain as a pop cultural phenomenon in her own right, Cain emptying her lungs and the audience spilling their grief back at her.
From there the set shifted into Crush, bratty and playful, a highlight in her discography and a true fan favourite, “phones out, you guys really love this one!” she quipped at the onslaught of white iPhone flashes pointing back at her. “I owe you a black eye and two kisses, tell me when you wanna come and get ’em,” the audience belted in unison with her.
The night closed with American Teenager, Cain’s bona fide cult-classic pop hit. The song, undoubtedly a red herring for the discography that would follow it, still points to her ability to dabble in both pop bombast and Southern Gothic slowcore, as the closer of the night Anhedonia seemed aware of the necessity to balance both aspects of her artistry equally.
Nevertheless, she was adamant that this moment be on her own terms; stretching the phrasing and bending the tempo, slipping the song just out of sync with the crowd. The moment denied the easy catharsis of a sing-along. By denying the audience their easy chorus, she kept the hymn for herself, the kind of stilted almost-there moment that Cain revels in.
By the time the lights dimmed the theatre still felt heavy. Cain had carried us through youth, death, and reflection until the encore cracked open into communion. She left the stage like a saint in the making, freshly canonized, her voice still hanging in the room long after the lights went dark.
Ethel Cain continues her The Willoughby Tucker Forever tour across North America and Europe through the fall.
Jenny is the editor-at-large at Liminul.
Ex-tumblr girl, flâneuse, art history grad, and staunch defender of the Oxford comma.