“I feel like I’ve been waiting about a decade to get out here,” says Hayden Silas Anhedönia as she floats on stage in a vintage, puff-sleeve frock and poker-straight hair. This, Anhedönia announces, is her first London show as Ethel Cain – a name she has been clear is a persona she will use for a few albums, the first among them the sprawling, gothic pop of this year’s Preacher’s Daughter.
As her crystalline voice floats over the simple guitar-and-drums arrangement of Strangers, it becomes clear that those present are seeing something special: we are, as the Christian figure of Cain might put it, bearing witness. Preacher’s Daughter is a unique album: a heavy concept record about love, murder, exploitation and cannibalism, as well as a meditation on religion and patriotism’s places in the American psyche, which has inspired cult adoration. Tonight it’s credit to Cain’s deftness as a performer that she handles its complexity as though it were the most straightforward pop: her voice is lithe, and the long, coffin-shaped acrylic nails on the ends of her fingers catch the light starrily.
She gets her biggest hit, the Taylor Swift-worthy American Teenager, out of the way as song two before zipping through the rest of the album. Particularly impressive are the stops she makes at the down-home epic Throughfare, and the country-tinged power balladry of Sun Bleached Flies. On the latter, the young crowd is moved to arms-up rapture as she sings, “God loves you, but not enough to save you,” raising her hands as if she is receiving the spirit, too.
Cain is a serious performer – although she is early in her career, she gives the complete sense that she is at home as a performer – but she also has fun during her first London show. She dedicates a song to “the twink in the front row”, and promises that on her next trip to London she’ll “play a really big room” (tomorrow, at least, she plays a bigger one at the 1,600-capacity Heaven). You only have to hear Ethel Cain sing for a few moments – her voice alternately wavering and commanding, always controlling the energy in the room – to become a believer.
• At London’s Heaven, 7 December
