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Midway through the music video for \u201cAmerican Teenager,\u201d a feel-good pop song that has been streamed more than a hundred million times, the camera cuts, for an instant, to two children sitting in front of a television, watching live footage of the Twin Towers falling. The track itself, which the twenty-seven-year-old musician Hayden Anhed\u00f6nia has performed at Coachella and in dozens of arenas around the world, conceals a similar darkness; fluttering harmonies and a dancey drumbeat sweeten a sure-handed critique of U.S. military agitprop. \u201cThe neighbor\u2019s brother came home in a box \/ But he wanted to go, so maybe it was his fault,\u201d Anhed\u00f6nia sings. \u201cAnother red heart taken by the American dream.\u201d Barack Obama added it to his annual favorites playlist in 2022. Anhed\u00f6nia, however, had little interest in being the country\u2019s next down-home sweetheart. \u201cI don\u2019t want to be a celebrity,\u201d she told the Times<\/em>, that same year.<\/p>\n Attention found her anyway. During the pandemic, prairie aesthetics\u2014gingham dresses, dried wildflowers, fishtail braids\u2014took hold among young people online: a trend quaintly named cottagecore. Anhed\u00f6nia\u2019s promotional art featured tattered American flags, wood panelling, white lace, and church spires; her Southern-gothic alter ego, Ethel Cain, became the movement\u2019s unlikely face. But, in contrast to some adherents who seemed to be channelling nostalgia for a bygone era, her relationship to the style was complicated\u2014part satire, part reckoning with her evangelical upbringing.<\/p>\n Anhed\u00f6nia\u2019s d\u00e9but LP, \u201cPreacher\u2019s Daughter,\u201d from 2022, is a thirteen-track concept album about the abduction of the teen-age Ethel\u2014a roots-rock opera for fans of Flannery O\u2019Connor. The tale begins in 1991, after Ethel\u2019s sadistic father dies and her boyfriend, Willoughby, leaves her. She runs away from home and hitches a ride with an older man who sells her into prostitution, eventually killing and cannibalizing her. The songs, which combine a languid, Lana Del Rey-esque pastiche of Southern femininity with the droning atmospherics of nineties slowcore, slyly transmit Anhed\u00f6nia\u2019s ideologies. The record\u2019s riveting narrative and political conscience stood out in an age of generic radio fare and overcautious stars. It was a runaway hit.<\/p>\n This week, Anhed\u00f6nia released \u201cWilloughby Tucker, I\u2019ll Always Love You,\u201d a kind of prequel to her d\u00e9but. She writes, produces, and engineers almost all of her music; on the new album, she contributes percussion, banjo, synth, piano, bass, and at least three different kinds of guitar. This time, the story hinges on the heartbreak that put Ethel on the road to her gruesome fate. Willoughby\u2019s father, a traumatized Vietnam vet, abuses him\u2014on one track, Ethel calls her boyfriend a \u201cnatural blood-stained blond\u201d\u2014and the young lovers fantasize about escape. But the imagined happy ending is fleeting. Anhed\u00f6nia soon lays out their doomed futures: Willoughby will be deployed to fight in a war, and Ethel, of course, will be kidnapped.<\/p>\n Not all of these details are divulged in the lyrics. Much of Anhed\u00f6nia\u2019s world-building is communicated through extratextual materials: blog posts, illustrations, Q.\u00a0&\u00a0A.s, and passages from a novel she has been working on, which her fans have studiously collated. The fictional universe of these records also rhymes with the circumstances of Anhed\u00f6nia\u2019s youth. Her father, like Ethel\u2019s, was a clergyman; she, too, was raised in a small, conservative town, with loved ones who served in the military. Anhed\u00f6nia\u2019s earliest exposure to contemporary culture came in the form of the true-crime serials her grandmother loved, which kindled her own interest in the macabre. Much of her artistic education happened in church, where she sang in the choir and practiced classical piano. Her coming-out was met with predictable hostility. At eighteen, she left her parents\u2019 house, and began making music\u2014namely Gregorian chants and nightmarish electronic pieces, produced on GarageBand and inspired by the goth clubs where she\u2019d been experimenting with narcotics.<\/p>\n