Ethel Cain’s The Willoughby Tucker Forever Tour in London review: Hypnotic, funereal pop-rock

Picture this: Attitude, flustered and late, was still buying a beer when the Lynchian chords of ‘Willoughby’s Theme’ rattled the bones of Eventim Apollo last week. Missing the opening moments of a set by someone you love is usually a catastrophe, but as Ethel Cain took to the stage at 9:10pm sharp, and that meditative melody seeped through the walls, we felt oddly calm. The music wasn’t rushing — and neither were we.

‘Isn’t rushing’ is an understatement: so deliberately samey are many of Cain’s songs — despairing, glacial laments more emotionally purging than a hundred therapy sessions — that they bleed elegantly into one another, as if designed to weed out all but the most attentive listener. The star herself, a commanding, backlit silhouette with a crucifix for a mic stand, barely moved for large swathes of the evening. Indeed, beyond some staggeringly atmospheric (and occasionally blinding) lightplay and enough dry ice to make a ghost cough, little changed. This might have tested the patience of the uninitiated, but to this dumbfounded, quietly zealous audience, it was a kind of communion.

Plus it’s a relief, to be frank, to dabble in pop’s darkness without the hammy helpings of Elvira-style camp we’re used to. We loved the cartoony horror of Lady Gaga’s Mayhem Ball, of course, and miss Lana Del Rey at her most hyper-stylised and tragic – but they’re shape-shifters. The Ethel Cain persona, constructed by Hayden Silas Anhedönia, is so oppressively specific and drawn-out — a Southern Gothic girl trapped by social decay who, as we learned on 2022 album Preacher’s Daughter, will eventually die a hideous death — that it’s a reminder of how potent and intellectually stimulating a single, fully realised concept can be.

This idea was crystallised in the amplification of Cain’s dense, thunderous voice, thickening the sweetness of the lush and layered instrumentation of ‘Nettles’ and ‘Fuck Me Eyes’. When she turned the mic toward the crowd, it wasn’t to dodge a note — it’s to spotlight her sharpest lyrics. (“We should stop watching the news, ’cause baby I’ve never seen brown eyes look so blue” and “Jesus if you’re there, why do I feel alone in this room?” are blinders.) The sound coming out of her was so beautiful that we often closed our eyes and drifted, despite the arresting stagecraft framed by weeping willows and fairy lights.

It’s been a volatile year for Cain, full of historic highs and “deeply shameful” lows. As such, we couldn’t help but study her for signs that she’s now on more even keel. But so shrouded in literal darkness, statuesque and stoic, she was almost impossible to read. Imagine our joy, then, when she burst to life for the encore, kicking her legs and flicking her hair for fan favourites ‘Crush’ and ‘American Teenager’, like the carnival after Sunday service. Was this a hint of the real, unburdened Anhedönia peeping through? Or is she, too, a shapeshifter? Either way, we’re enthralled. We would have loved for her to go full-on “Miss Alt-Pop Star” on closer ‘Sun Bleached Flies’, by performing it as the Robyn ‘Dancing On My Own’ fan-made mashup. But that fact she doesn’t go there may even be better. A true original.