In a recent interview, Hayden Anhedönia, the 27-year-old Florida artist known professionally as Ethel Cain, admitted that she had struggled with her position in pop. It’s not that she isn’t a fan of the genre, she said, but rather that the nature of modern-day fandom meant the dark subject matter embedded in her music wasn’t always taken seriously: “At the end of the day, you make what you make … and people can do what they want with it.”
Anhedönia isn’t the first artist to balk at pop stardom, although few would use that resistance as the primary fuel for their live show. But after appearing on stage tonight during the churning opener of Willoughby’s Theme, it’s quickly apparent she is eschewing the spotlight – quite literally. For almost the entirety of the show’s 90 minutes, she is bathed in shadows, her frame lit mostly from behind, her face never truly visible. There’s no onstage chat, aside from reminders to the overheated crowd to ask for water, and she remains static, standing back on the stage behind a mic stand shaped like a cross, as if delivering a sermon.
If this sounds dull, it isn’t, in part because of the superb lighting. It animates the music, as during the whirring second chorus of Dust Bowl, with strobing effects and flashes of colour; the staging, with its hanging branches of greenery, is lit orange as if aflame. The intention seems to be to centre the song not the star, and it works: Tempest, a swampy 10-minute epic, is totally compelling with its distorted guitars and seraphic backing vocals. The drone songs lifted from the experimental album Perverts drag you into a blood-soaked, southern gothic world thanks to the brilliant band and Anhedönia’s crystalline vocals.
Only during the encore – a triumphant hat-trick of Thoroughfare, Crush and American Teenager – does Anhedönia venture forward into the pop-star spotlight. It’s a moment of catharsis for her and the crowd after all the intensity – although, judging by a few empty seats, this payoff arrived too late for some. Still, the whole show feels like a rebuttal against a culture in which art is being made to appeal to our shortening attention spans. If you can stick it out, it’s totally worth it.
