![]() ![]() They were, she says, “the only thing keeping me from not having a single person on the planet who believed in me.” When she was 13, she started imagining what it would be like to live the life of a successful singer à la Florence, one who resides in a mansion, goes on tour, and does interviews. To escape her religious community, which she now describes as “cult-y” and “psychotic,” she invented elaborate fantasies in her own head. “As I got older, I found out there were other options,” she says, “and it made sense.”Įven in her early teens, she wasn’t allowed to go on the internet, listen to non-Christian music, or pick out her own clothes. “The first person who told me that I wasn’t going to hell when I died was my therapist that my parents forced me to get when I was 16.” Everyone pigeonholed her as gay, though she remembers thinking, That doesn’t really fit me. “I was the spawn of Satan to most people,” she says. When she was 12, she told her mom she liked boys, and remembers the feeling of shame that went along with it. “Everywhere I went, I felt like I was in a glass bubble nobody could see me, but I could see them.” She was treated differently by her friends’ parents, and wasn’t allowed to go on sleepovers at their houses. But she always felt like the odd one out. “We were just total little shits, but it was fun,” she says of her fellow homeschooled Baptist kids. The oldest of four kids, she describes her childhood as simple: riding around on the four-wheeler, digging for crawdads in the creek, picking sand spurs out of her feet. Hayden Silas Anhedönia was born on March 24, 1998, and grew up in a woodsy small town called Perry along the Florida Panhandle. Who knows, I might have a manic episode that makes me scrap her later down the line and go by a completely new name. You can’t catch her lacking, I suppose.” She clears her throat before adding, “I’m also bipolar so I’m constantly flip-flopping between stuff. “Nothing can happen to her that she doesn’t want to happen. She describes Ethel as no-nonsense, intimidating, dominant-a woman in control. Whether she’s offering power ballad perfection on “ Michelle Pfeiffer,” epic folk-pop on the eight-and-a-half-minute “God’s Country,” or unsettling grunge on the title track, an aura of eerie grandeur, along with Anhedönia’s versatile vocals, keeps everything bound together. Her forthcoming EP, Inbred-which, like her other releases thus far, she wrote, recorded, produced, and mixed almost entirely on her own-expands Ethel Cain’s stylistic range considerably. “But she’s also my role model in a way, because she’s what I want to be.” Anhedönia began releasing a string of wispy songs and EPs under the moniker two years ago, sounding at times like a slowed and reverb version of her teen idol Florence Welch, or Lana Del Rey under the spell of Grouper. “Ethel is not a separate character as much as a chunk of my life that I cut off to make her own entity, because it was getting to a point where she was taking me over,” Anhedönia explains. “The quintessential Florida experience,” she quips.Īs far as where Hayden Anhedönia begins and Ethel Cain ends, exactly, it’s still something she’s working out. She starts a story about a pivotal acid trip she took in the woods last year with something of a disclaimer: “I don’t even know if I can say this on here…” And she loves using the word “funky” to describe everything from her sheltered religious upbringing to a Tallahassee house she once lived in that was situated in the middle of a car lot and crawling with every insect imaginable. Though her music floats along a mood of dreamy doom, her unflinching lyrics detail scenes of self-harm, toxic sex, and hopeless decrepitude, and her very active Twitter feed (which she refers to as her “ADHD ramblings”) is filled with scary-funny bon mots like “all u need to know about me is that i was the girl in middle school who wanted to fuck slenderman,” Anhedönia is nothing but polite during our chat. She’s in her pandemic best-a dirt brown sweatshirt covered in images of leaves and tree bark, and pajama bottoms dotted with skulls-her hair pulled away from her face with a scrunchie, exposing a ring of tiny tattoos lining the top of her forehead.
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