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Today, concept albums aren’t rare, but Ethel Cain’s “Preacher’s Daughter” is unrivaled in how it critiques American faith, identity and trauma through musical storytelling. Ethel Cain is the creation and stage name of Hayden Anhedönia, a 27-year-old singer-songwriter from Florida. Following the release of her album “Preacher’s Daughter” on vinyl in early 2025, Cain was the first openly trans artist to enter the Billboard Top 100, nearly three years after the album’s initial release in 2022. She has created an entire alternate universe through her music where she becomes the character Ethel Cain; she embodies this young woman’s struggles, and her genius in storytelling is underrated.
Cain tells the story of this fictional young woman in “Preacher’s Daughter,” which has two acts: the first, the story of her upbringing, and the second, the story of her abduction and death. In the story, Ethel Cain is from the fictional town of Shady Grove, Alabama. She is the daughter of a Southern Baptist preacher, who molests her throughout her childhood and dies when she is ten. Cain feels pressured to take over her father’s congregation, despite her alcoholism and wavering faith. Her struggles with addiction, unresolved trauma and losing her first love cause her to run away from home. She ends up in California, where she is trafficked, drugged and eventually murdered. Though Cain’s story is tragic and at times surreal, its lyricism and more abstract themes make it deeply relatable.
While all the twelve tracks on “Preacher’s Daughter” are important to Ethel Cain’s story, I will be talking about two of her most popular songs, one from each act of the album: “American Teenager” and “Ptolemaea.” “American Teenager” is her most streamed song on Spotify, with over 90 million plays, and is very reminiscent of Bruce Springsteen and heartland rock. “Ptolemaea,” on the other hand, begins with haunting audio distortion and ends just before Ethel’s death.
“American Teenager” is the second track on “Preacher’s Daughter,” and opens with an electric guitar followed by wordless vocalizations, then drums and the first lines of lyrics: “Grew up under yellow light on the street / Putting too much faith in the make-believe / And another high school football team.” Immediately, the tone is set. Cain is singing about not just her character’s youth, but the shared youth of the American teenager — the time in our lives that is defined by football games, summer barbecues and decisions we’re too young for. In these opening lines, Cain is telling us that her adolescence suffocated her, and America’s cultural identity is only making it worse.
The second half of the first verse takes a dark turn, when she sings, “The neighbor’s brother came home in a box / But he wanted to go, so maybe it was his fault / Another red heart taken by the American dream.” This is a familiar American scene: a young man enlists in the army and is sent off to war, where he dies. Here, Cain is directly criticizing the pro-military culture in the United States, a culture that promotes kids right out of high school, who cannot legally drink or smoke, doing the heroic thing and going to war. Later, in the chorus, Cain brings up veterans and war again. When she sings, “Say what you want, but say it like you mean it / With your fists for once, a long cold war / With your kids at the front,” she’s speaking about veterans; the ones that are so sensationalized and so brave, yet they are traumatized and sent home, where few benefits and resources await them. The veterans our government calls heroes are being abandoned by the American dream. In a time where American exceptionalism is shaping policy, “American Teenager” is a subtle political anthem.
In the second half of “American Teenager,” Cain sings about her character’s own life. It is revealed here that Ethel deals with substance abuse, probably to cope with her father’s death and her lifelong trauma. With the lines, “Jesus, if You’re listening let me handle my liquor / And Jesus, if You’re there / Why do I feel so alone in this room with You?” Cain, once devout, is losing faith. For a traumatized young woman, belief in something intangible seems impossible. The last line of the song ties everything together, with, “I do it for my daddy and I do it for Dale / I’m doing what I want and damn, I’m doing it well / For me, for me.” In these lines, we see Ethel as an unreliable narrator for the first time. Up until this point in the song, Ethel has been suffocating under the weight of the American dream, but she claims that she’s doing what she wants. She is doing her best for her dead father and Dale Earnhardt, a beloved late NASCAR driver. The song ends with more electric guitar and synthesizers: a distinctly all-American sound.
“Ptolemaea” is track nine, and at this point much has changed since “American Teenager.” Cain has lost her first love, been in an abusive relationship and reflected on her past trauma. She met a man named Isaiah in track seven, “Thoroughfare,” which details their meeting and them falling in love. Again, Cain is an unreliable narrator here: on a missing poster created for the project, it asserts that Cain is abducted by Isaiah. There is no grand love story. Either way, Isaiah drugs her and sells her into sex work. In “Ptolemaea,” Cain confronts the darkness of Isaiah through the haze of the drugs he has been feeding her. The title refers to Ptolemea, one of the four concentric rings in Dante’s ninth layer of hell, where traitors reside. The song starts with a haunting, distorted noise that resembles humming, followed by the steady beat of a drum that mimics a heartbeat and then the buzzing of thousands of flies. The opening lines are spoken in a man’s deep, resonant voice that wavers and contorts. This is Isaiah speaking to Cain, telling her, “You love blood too much / but not like I do / Not like I do.” Isaiah is using Cain’s religious trauma to taunt her, comparing her faith to a thirst for blood, a perverse nod to the Eucharist. The buzzing of flies gets louder and louder as Isaiah speaks.
Cain’s voice comes in, ethereal, as she tries to deal with her reality. The song has a creepy ambience that only intensifies as Cain and Isaiah go back and forth — Isaiah’s voice stays horrible and demonic through the haze of Ethel’s drugged mind. Isaiah begins to attack Ethel and she begs for her life, repeating, “Stop, make it stop, make it stop / I’ve had enough” until she lets out a final, horrifying scream of, “Stop!” It’s jarring, uncomfortable and makes Ethel’s suffering feel real and alive. “Ptolemaea” ends with a monologue spoken by Isaiah as he tortures Ethel. His words ring with allusions to Biblical stories, Ethel’s own life and his role as part of a cult. The song ends with the line, “You can’t hide from me forever,” which cements Isaiah in this story as a sadistic force to be reckoned with.
“Preacher’s Daughter” ends with the protagonist’s murder and cannibalization. Cain reflects on her life from the afterlife in the beautiful twelfth track, “Sun Bleached Flies” and taunts Isaiah in the final track, “Strangers,” where it’s implied that he gets deathly ill after eating her. Cain closes the album telling her mother not to worry about her — a beautiful and heart-wrenching end to the horrors of her life.
With “Preacher’s Daughter,” Ethel Cain has built a Southern gothic epic that stands out in today’s ever-expanding music culture. “Preacher’s Daughter” is not purely fiction or “just” music; it embodies the lies that built modern American exceptionalism. It’s a reminder that storytelling still has the power to disrupt the way we see this world and its downfalls.