Lana Del Rey appears to have escalated her public feud with rising alt-pop singer Ethel Cain.
On Wednesday, Del Rey, 40, shared an Instagram video featuring a snippet of a song from her next album, with the opening lyrics: “Ethel Cain hated my Instagram post / Think it’s cute reenacting my Chicago pose.”
The verse seems to refer to a 2024 picture of Cain with Del Rey’s supposed ex-boyfriend, Jack Donoghue, the co-founder of electronic band Salem. The picture showed Cain, 27, and Donoghue in front of a dam, posing similarly to an old photo of Del Rey and Donoghue outside Chicago’s Cook County Jail.
“The most famous girl at the Waffle House / I don’t regret it / The most famous girl at the Waffle House,” the song continued. Some fans have interpreted these lyrics to be a clear shot at a 2022 New York Times headline, which declared Cain “the most famous girl at the Waffle House.”
In 2023, Del Rey was famously spotted working a shift at an Alabama Waffle House.
Within hours of Del Rey’s diss track teaser, Cain claimed on her Instagram Story that the “Summertime Sadness” singer-songwriter blocked her.
Beneath a Pop Base post about the new song, Del Rey commented Thursday that Cain had body-shamed her in the past.
“I don’t know who Ethel was until a few years ago – when someone brought to my attention the disturbing and graphic side-by-side images she would often put up of me next to unflattering creatures and cartoon characters making constant comments about my weight, I was confused at what she was getting at,” she wrote.
“Then when I heard what she was saying behind closed doors from mutual friends and started inserting herself into my personal life I was definitely disturbed.”
The Independent has contacted Del Rey and Cain’s representatives for comment.
Cain rose to prominence in 2022 following the release of her debut album, Preacher’s Daughter. She has long faced comparisons to Del Rey due to their moody, cinematic styles.
Earlier this week, Cain kicked off her Willoughby Tucker Forever tour in support of her new album, Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You.
The record has been well-received by critics and listeners, with two of its tracks, “F*** My Eyes” and “Nettles,” already topping Cain’s current popular songs on Spotify.
In a four-star review of the album, The Independent’s Louis Chilton described it as a “dark, Lynchian coming-of-age story.”
“It’s an utterly cohesive record, perhaps to a fault; the individual parts end up consumed by the whole,” Chilton wrote. “If you vibe with it, though, [Cain] has made an album that has real depths to explore – it’s just a matter of finding the right frequency.”
