Before the bodies washed up and the blood dried on Preacher’s Daughter, there was Willoughby Tucker — young, reckless, and real. That’s where we begin. Florida-born multimedia artist Hayden Anhedönia, better known as Ethel Cain, returns with Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You, her long-awaited sophomore album and a sun-blistered prequel to the 2022 breakout Preacher’s Daughter. Where that record ended in death and damnation, this one pulses with the heat of first love, one that is humid, wide-eyed, and fated to fall apart.

Recorded over several years in home studios stretching from Coraopolis, PA to Tallahassee, FL, the album is a patchwork of obsessions and memory, stitched together with shoegaze haze, Southern gothic grandeur, and the ghostly hum of small-town heartbreak. Cain plays nearly everything herself, co-producing and arranging like a woman possessed, channeling years of myth-making into 73 minutes of swelling sound and cracked intimacy.

“I was writing about love I never processed,” Cain said in a recent interview. “This album is a reckoning.”

Lead singles “Nettles” and “Fuck Me Eyes” laid the groundwork with equal parts doomed romance and fever dream, laced with synths, steel guitar, and unsettling calm. The tracklist reads like a handwritten note passed in class and tucked inside a Bible: “Waco, Texas,” “Willoughby’s Theme,” “Salvation’s Coming.” The narrative is cinematic, but the pain is personal. If Preacher’s Daughter was the crucifixion, Willoughby Tucker is the Garden of Eden. Sweaty, naïve, and already collapsing under the weight of what’s to come.

Rumors swirl that this may be the final Ethel Cain record — at least in this form. Anhedönia has hinted that she may retire the persona after this album cycle, choosing to close the book on a character she’s been building since her teenage years. But she’s also teased a future project centered around Ethel’s mother, Vera. Proof that in Cain’s world, no story really ends. It just gets passed down.