Willoughby Tucker is the rare prequel that makes the original sadder

Most prequels exist to explain things nobody asked about. Ethel Cain made one to break your heart in advance.

If you came in late: Hayden Anhedönia, who records as Ethel Cain, built a whole American gothic universe on her 2022 debut. The narrator, also called Ethel, runs from a fundamentalist Florida household, falls for the wrong man, and ends up dismembered and eaten by him. It is as bleak as that sounds, and it became a slow-burn phenomenon anyway, the kind of record that lived on Tumblr reblogs and 2 a.m. RateYourMusic ratings long before any radio noticed.

So when Anhedönia announced the follow-up would be a prequel about the teenage romance that started it all, the obvious worry was that she'd sand the edges off. Give the doomed girl a few happy years before the abattoir. Soften it.

She did the opposite.

A love story you already know the ending of

Willoughby Tucker runs almost 74 minutes across ten songs, and it spends most of them on something Preacher's Daughter never had room for: ordinary, dumb, all-consuming young love. The narrator is sixteen, then seventeen, then twenty, falling for a boy named Willoughby across the back half of the 1980s in a part of the country that's already losing.

The trick, and it's a real one, is that every tender moment here is poisoned by what we know is coming. When she sings "Fuck Me Eyes" with the giddy abandon of a teenager who thinks this is forever, you already know how forever turns out. The album doesn't have to foreshadow doom. We brought the doom with us. That's the prequel working as designed, and almost nobody pulls it off.

"Nettles," the lead single, is where this lands hardest. It's a plainspoken devotional, the sound of a girl deciding a boy is her whole life, and it's gorgeous, and it's unbearable. Anhedönia knows you're flinching. She wrote it to make you.

The patience is the point

The length is what splits people. This is a slow record, deliberately, with three tracks past seven minutes and a fifteen-minute closer. On RateYourMusic it sailed to the top of the 2025 slowcore chart, and the slowcore tag is right: these songs unfold at the pace of a long drive with nothing to say.

"Waco, Texas" closes the album by stretching a single feeling across a quarter of an hour, all swelling reverb and Anhedönia's voice dissolving into the mix. It's the most divisive thing here. Skeptics hear an artist indulging herself. I hear someone who learned the right lesson from slowcore's whole history, that grief and longing don't resolve on a three-minute pop clock, and that the boredom is part of the ache. If you've spent any time with Low or Grouper, you already know how this kind of patience pays back.

Where it sits in the catalog

Anhedönia is a strange case for the RYM crowd to love, because on paper she's a pop project with a major distributor and a big online following. In practice she's making some of the slowest, least commercial music of anyone at her profile, and getting more uncompromising with each release. The 2025 noise experiment {{album:231272}} that preceded this one scared off plenty of casual fans on purpose. Willoughby Tucker is the warmer record by comparison, but only by comparison.

It also belongs to a tradition this site keeps circling back to: music that treats loss as a subject worth a whole album rather than a single sad song. If that's your register, our guide to albums about grief is the obvious next stop, and the slowcore holy trinity maps the lineage Willoughby Tucker is extending.

Is it better than the debut?

That's the argument worth having. Preacher's Daughter has the shocks, the narrative payoff, the songs people already know. Willoughby Tucker has none of those advantages and a much harder job: making you feel a tragedy by withholding it. I think it's the more mature record and the harder listen, which on a slowcore album is usually a compliment.

But I'd rather know what you think. Rate it below, then tell me whether the prequel earns its 74 minutes or whether you'd trim the closer. And if you've never gone near Ethel Cain because the murder-cannibalism summary scared you off, start here instead. The horror's still there. It's just three years away.