There’s something quietly, encouragingly perplexing about Ethel Cain’s stint in London – a stretch of her tour that encompasses five sold-out nights at Hammersmith’s Eventim Apollo, playing to a total of around 25,000 fans. A sea of people, mostly card-carrying members of Generation Z, pile into the west London venue for the first of these nights – an evening of music that’s raw, slow and almost pointedly uncommercial, swooping between big, churning ballads and doomy ambience.
But that is the contradiction of Cain — or, to use her real name, 27-year-old Hayden Anhedonia — an artist who has somehow hit the big time with a sound that seems antithetical to pop success. For pretty much the entirety of the set, Anhedonia performs in the shadows, masked by dry ice, or backlit in moody silhouette. For one song, the stage is plunged into darkness, her singing continuing as an unseen, disembodied voice. This is confessional songwriting rendered with a disorienting opacity, music that is somehow both immediate and removed.
The set begins patiently, with “Willoughby’s Theme”, an instrumental number from her most recent album, Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You. Anhedonia then launches into “F*** Me Eyes”, a complexly catchy shoegaze ballad with shades of Kim Carnes’s “Bette Davis Eyes”. Anhedonia’s voice, sad and sturdy, flits around the song’s established melody, gliding through new and interesting alleyways. Her music feels, at times, indebted to Phoebe Bridgers, never more than on the fraught and folky “Nettles”; unlike Bridgers, she largely steers clear of breathy falsetto, in favour of a tone that’s cutting and full-bodied.
Anhedonia’s set isn’t so much choreographed as arranged: she spends much of the performance standing posed before a large wooden cross, while the lighting changes drastically for each song. This is a visual experience, not just an aural one. When she tackles songs such as “Vacillator” – a foreboding, atmospheric track from January’s drone record Perverts – the whole thing takes on the feel of performance art: music that is less enjoyable than provocative, and brought to life with a real focus on stagecraft.
These detours into the ballpark of the avant-garde only make Anhedonia’s specific type of following – young, adoring fans, screaming along lyrics in unison when prompted – all the more incongruous. (It’s partly the arresting, pseudo-Lynchian aesthetic, I suspect, and the biting candour with which Anhedonia dissects the adolescent experience.) Only when we get to the encore does Anhedonia start matching the electric energy of her audience: breaking free of the carefully lit poses she’s been striking all evening, the singer finally loosens up.
What we get are three slightly earlier cuts: the potent, crescendoing “A House in Nebraska”, the punchy, fierce “Crush”, and, finally, the synth-pop banger “American Teenager”, performed as Anhedonia struts animatedly around the front of the stage. It’s a release, of sorts, and the most purely fun section of the night. More than anything, it shows what sort of artist Cain could be if she leant into her poppier impulses. But what she’s choosing to do instead is fascinating nonetheless.
