Ethel Cain

Ethel Cain’s lilting voice and intimate adult alternative songs navigate melancholy moods and dreamy, reverb-heavy atmospheres. After using other aliases as a teen, she emerged as Ethel Cain with a series of EPs in the late 2010s and early 2020s before presenting her full-length debut, Preacher's Daughter, in 2022. Following appearances on concert bills with acts like Mitski and Florence + the Machine, her darker second album, Perverts, arrived in 2025. Born in Tallahassee to a church deacon and his wife, Cain was homeschooled throughout her formative years in northern Florida and sang in the church choir from a young age. Soon after discovering the music of Florence + the Machine, Cain wrote her first album’s worth of material on a Casio keyboard around the age of 15. Though she left the church at 16 and came out as a transgender woman at the age of 20, gospel hymns, along with alternative music, pop, and classic rock, would help inform her songwriting. Initially recording under the aliases White Silas and Atlas, she released her first mixtape at the age of 19 before making her Ethel Cain debut with the song “Bruises” a couple years later in August 2019. The EPs Carpet Bed and Golden Age quickly followed in September and December of that year. After connecting with style-adjacent singer/songwriter Nicole Dollanganger on social media, Cain opened a show for her in Chicago, also in 2019. In mid-2020, Cain moved from Florida to Indiana, where she recorded her third EP, Inbred. It included the single “Michelle Pfeiffer” featuring rapper Lil Aaron. She issued a cover of Britney Spears’ “Everytime” in early 2022 before releasing her first album that May. Titled Preacher's Daughter, it arrived on her own Daughters of Cain label. The record was well-received and led to opening slots for Florence + the Machine, Caroline Polachek, and Mitski, among others. Cain contributed a song to the tribute album American Football (Covers) in October 2024, the same month she offered up the elegiac single “Punish” ahead of her sophomore LP. The self-produced Perverts followed on Daughters of Cain in January 2025. Later that year, Graffiti Records released a limited-edition (only 218 copies) double-vinyl version of Cain’s debut, Preacher's Daughter, which included a signed jacket and hand-numbered hype stickers. ~ Marcy Donelson