Preacher's Daughter

Preacher’s Daughter is Ethel Cain’s debut studio album, released May 12, 2022 on her own Daughters of Cain Records. It is the foundational text of the Ethel Cain mythology: a Southern Gothic concept record following its narrator from a violent, God haunted childhood, through a doomed love and a flight across America, to captivity, death, and a strange afterlife.

Across thirteen tracks the album moves from radio bright pop to ambient dread and back, binding heartland Americana to horror. It is at once the story of one girl and an indictment of the country, church, and family that made and unmade her, the record every later release, including the prequel Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You, circles back to.

Preacher’s Daughter went on the road twice. The Freezer Bride Tour opened in Bloomington, Indiana in July 2022, two months after the record, and ran 37 shows across North America and Europe before closing in London that December. Along the way she played Pitchfork Music Festival and opened a night of Florence and the Machine’s Dance Fever Tour.

The Blood Stained Blonde Tour followed in 2023, 46 shows from Mexico City in April to San Francisco in October, across North America, Oceania and Europe. The rooms grew with the record. That year brought her Coachella debut, Radio City Music Hall and the Sydney Opera House.