Ethel Cain – Dust Bowl

‘Dust Bowl’ opens with a deliberately detuned guitar, immediately signaling unstable emotional territory. What follows is six and a half minutes of Ethel Cain’s signature alchemy – transforming personal trauma into achingly beautiful art.

Originally released on SoundCloud in 2022, this reworked version gains new weight within Hayden Anhedönia’s prequel album ‘Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You’. The track captures teenage Ethel experiencing first love with Willoughby Tucker, painting vivid scenes of drive-in movies and inherited damage. The climactic eruption arrives when she mentions Vietnam-era trauma – “Cooking our brains smoking that shit your daddy smoked in Vietnam” – triggering generational wounds that echo through her bloodline.

‘Dust Bowl’ represents everything Anhedönia does best: turning personal mythology into universal truth. The production lets her vocal performance swell and wane at precisely the right moments, creating space for both tenderness and violence to coexist.

We’ll be diving deeper into ‘Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You’ in our upcoming Album Spotlight – this devastating prequel trilogy finale deserves comprehensive exploration.

Tracklist:

1. Janie
2. Willoughby’s Theme
3. Nettles
4. Willoughby’s Interlude
5. Dust Bowl
6. Fuck Me Eyes
7. A Knock at the Door
8. Tempest
9. Waco, Texas

European Tour Dates:

• October 2 // Manchester, England
• October 3 // Manchester, England
• October 4 // Glasgow, Scotland
• October 6 // London, England
• October 7 // London, England
• October 9 // London, England
• October 10 // London, England
• October 11 // London, England
• October 14 // Brussels, Belgium
• October 15 // Utrecht, Netherlands
• October 16 // Utrecht, Netherlands
• October 18 // Paris, France
• October 19 // Paris, France
• October 21 // Cologne, Germany
• October 23 // Berlin, Germany
• October 24 // Hamburg, Germany
• October 25 // Copenhagen, Denmark
• October 27 // Oslo, Norway
• October 28 // Stockholm, Sweden
• October 31 // Warsaw, Poland
• November 1 // Prague, Czech Republic
• November 2 // Vienna, Austria
• November 4 // Zurich, Switzerland
• November 5 // Milan, Italy
• November 7 // Barcelona, Spain
• November 8 // Madrid, Spain
• November 9 // Lisbon, Portugal