‘I felt like a performing monkey’: Ethel Cain on fans, fainting and being ‘Miss Alt-Pop Star’

A few weeks ago, Hayden Anhedönia fainted mid-show. The 25-year-old songwriter and musician, who in the past year and a half has found sudden fame under the stage name Ethel Cain, was performing at the Sydney Opera House. Halfway through the fan-favourite A House in Nebraska, she realised something was wrong. “Every time I belted, I felt a little bit dizzier,” she recalls. “Right as I was going into the second chorus, I was like: ‘Here we go.’” And then: lights out.

The Pittsburgh-based Anhedönia stresses that the incident was “nothing serious … I’m used to being alone in a quiet, isolated environment – I’m kind of a low-energy, low-vibration, low-stamina person to begin with – so let’s just say I’m very out of shape,” she says. But the incident sent a ripple through her huge fanbase, who had begun tweeting and posting footage shortly after it happened. “I kind of just sat in a room for six years making music, and then suddenly I was on the road all the time,” she says. “Usually I’m able to, like, grip the mic stand and kind of push through, but Sydney night two, it was like, ‘Nope, you flew too close to the sun with that one.’”

Passing out at the Opera House was a capstone on 12 months that have served as a kind of crash course in alternative pop stardom for Anhedönia – even if she never really wanted to be a pop star to begin with. Raised in a Southern Baptist family in small-town Florida, she was homeschooled and raised listening to Christian music. As a teenager, she discovered pop, and became enamoured of the music of Florence + the Machine; she became active on Twitter and Tumblr, and started making friends online. She moved out of home at 18 and, at 20, came out as a trans woman. Shortly after, she began releasing music as Ethel Cain, a character inspired by southern gothic, horror films, and the religious trauma of Anhedönia’s own upbringing.

After building up a small, dedicated fanbase with a series of EPs released in 2019 and 2021, Anhedönia truly broke through into the alternative mainstream with 76-minute epic Preacher’s Daughter. Released last May, it tells the story of the Ethel Cain character, a gnarly tale of abuse and cannibalism that, somehow, became one of the year’s biggest pop breakouts, and a mainstay in critics’ end of year lists. Touching on hazy ambient music, gothic country and doom metal, many of its songs stretch out to the 10-minute mark, with no choruses or discernible hooks. Its calling-card single, American Teenager, is a heartland rock anthem that feels indebted to Taylor Swift and Bruce Springsteen, but most other songs, like the pulverising Gibson Girl or the glacially paced Thoroughfare, seem to exist at the intersection of Lana Del Rey, the ambient folk artist Grouper, and Godspeed You! Black Emperor at their most grinding.

And yet, the album struck a chord, winning Anhedönia a colossal, adoring fanbase, despite the relative density of the actual music. At the time of the album’s release, Anhedönia told the New York Times that she was happy to “play Miss Alt-Pop Star and … parade myself around” if it meant that she would be able to build a sustainable career. A year later, she seems less sure. Zooming from her bedroom in Pittsburgh, perched on a desk chair in a forest green hoodie, in front of a window that’s been blacked-out with a blanket, she says that she “would really love to have a much smaller fanbase, and kind of go back to where I was aiming for ahead of time” instead of the intense scrutiny – positive and negative – she faces now.

Part of Anhedönia’s popularity – she has nearly 300,000 Instagram followers, and was the face of recent Givenchy, Miu Miu and Marc Jacobs campaigns – can be attributed to the fact that she is extremely internet literate, and became known online for a sharp Twitter feed on which she participated in jokes and memes about her public image. It soon began to feel as if she was “a dancing monkey in a circus. It’s very like, ‘Oh, she’s so funny on Twitter, she’s so relatable’ and then it becomes this big weird joke cycle,” she says. Although she stresses that she loves the support and adoration of her fans, she says it can become demoralising to not have her art met on the level she’d like it to be: “Don’t get me wrong, laughter and memes and jokes are always really fun. But when you want to post something to be consumed seriously, people are still joking – and then you get like, thousands of comments that are like, ‘silly goose’. All of a sudden, you start to feel like you can’t turn off the memeable internet personality thing.”

Live, Anhedönia is a captivating, remarkable performer: during a show at the London club Omeara last year, you could hear a pin drop as she shepherded an audience of thrilled young fans through her largely hushed setlist. But at concerts, Anhedönia will sometimes be trying to perform her quietest, most intimate songs, only to have people yell jokes at her, breaking the spell. “I had a show recently where I was singing the really quiet intro to Sun Bleached Flies,” she recalls. “I went to hold [a fan’s] hand and they began sort of screaming, ‘I didn’t even know who you were two weeks ago, I found you through a meme on TikTok.’ It’s almost like heckling. I don’t think any of them are mean spirited, but it’s a little jarring.”

Earlier this month, she deleted her Twitter, leaving fans aghast. “I always kind of conflated openness with honesty and I thought that if I was completely transparent and bared every aspect of my soul that people would think I was relatable and kinda cool,” she says. “Then I was like, I don’t want to know you. I don’t want to be friends with you. I don’t want to have all of my personal business and every innermost thought just out there on the internet for the world to see.”

Another part of the reason Anhedönia pulled back from social media was the way that her fans began to demand access not just to her, but to her friends and family. “I really had no idea the full nature of [my success] until I had those closest to me kind of half-joking, half actually kind of complaining, being like: ‘People are DMing me and asking me questions about you and trying to become my friend only to find out months later that they’re really just trying to get to you through me,’” she says. “I always thought that success would exist in a vacuum for me but it did start to affect my family. And my closest friends and even just acquaintances of mine. I’m not Britney Spears, but it was noticeable for them and it created a really weird dynamic between us for a while.”

Part of the problem, Anhedönia thinks, is the fact that she is often classed as a pop artist, and therefore becomes part of the stan economy, wherein teens treat female artists “like fantasy football teams”, arguing “about streams and stats and followers and almost using them as like Pokémon to fight each other.”

Right now, aside from an impending tour, Anhedönia is living the quiet life in Pittsburgh – “I just sit in my cave all day and write or embroider, watch a movie, play a game. My friends and I will go to the woods or a river, anywhere there’s not a lot of people” – and working on the follow-up to Preacher’s Daughter. “I’m trying to push my own envelope a bit. I’m trying to be super intentional about it and careful and dedicated and meticulous. Some of the songs I’m proudest of are on this project.”

Still, she is conscious of where her music goes, and says “no to most opportunities … I’ve been asked to share some stages with some artists, I’ve been asked to sing on some songs with some big artists, and I just had to say no, because I don’t want to be up there with them, I really don’t,” she says. “ I really do want to reiterate how grateful I am for everyone who’s ever said a nice word about my music. But I really think there can be too much of a good thing – there’s just some levels of success that I really don’t want for myself.”

Ethel Cain tours the UK in August.