Ethel Cain’s “Nettles” Is a Southern Gothic Epic About Grief, Guilt, and the Ghosts That Linger

There are songs that play in the background of your life, and then there are songs that grab you by the collar, stare straight through you, and leave you hollowed out. Nettles by Ethel Cain is the latter.

The first single off her upcoming album, Willoughby Tucker, I Will Always Love You, Nettles is a sprawling, slow-motion gut-punch - a meditation on grief, love, religious trauma, and the suffocating stillness of mourning. Cain doesn’t just write songs; she builds worlds. This one feels like it was dug up from the roots of an old church buried in the woods, wrapped in kudzu and secrets.

From the first notes, you're immersed in a sonic haze of fiddle, pedal steel, and acoustic textures: equal parts lullaby and funeral dirge. It's music that feels haunted. Familiar like Sunday mornings in a house you no longer speak of, yet alien in its eerie quiet. Her vocals are breathy but anchored, floating like smoke through a landscape of loss.

And then this lyric hits: “It wasn’t pretty like the movies / It was ugly like what they all did to me.”

That line stopped me cold. Cain doesn’t romanticise pain, she strips it bare. There’s no attempt to tidy up the mess of grief, no glittery metaphor to make it easier to swallow. It’s raw, and it’s real, and it feels like something you’ve thought in the darkest corner of your mind but never dared to say aloud.

The refrain: “To love me is to suffer me”, echoes like a warning, or maybe a prayer. It circles back like a ghost you can’t shake. Cain doesn’t let you off the hook, and that’s part of her brilliance. This song doesn’t play at you - it plays through you. It stalks you. It sinks its teeth in.

What’s especially masterful is how Nettles exists not just as a standalone track, but as a continuation of Cain’s mythos. If Preacher’s Daughter introduced us to the haunted corridors of her world, Nettles opens the attic and lets all the air out. It revisits the doomed relationship hinted at in that debut, plunging deeper into the story of Willoughby Tucker, a name that already feels legendary in Cain’s expanding Southern Gothic universe.

There’s a connective tissue in everything she releases, like silk threads on a spiderweb, glistening just long enough to catch your breath before vanishing. Time in Cain’s world doesn’t move forward - it drips. “Time passes slower in the flicker of the hospital light,” she sings, and you’re there, in the room, under that buzzing fluorescence, watching someone slip away. It’s uncomfortably vivid. And that’s what makes it art.

Even at eight minutes long, Nettles feels too short. Every second is intentional. There’s no filler, no meandering. Just pure narrative pull. Cain’s vocal line: “Tell me all the time”, floats across the mix like a whispered confession, filled with ache. It’s melodic, yes, but it’s also felt. Like crying in a dream.

And then there’s this line: “I’ve never seen brown eyes look so blue.” That one wrecked me. I don’t know how Cain manages to embed so much emotion in so few words. Her lyricism is dense but unpretentious, poetic but plainspoken. These aren’t just good lines, they’re lived-in. They carry the weight of experience, of sleepless nights and silent drives and every moment you thought you might break.

What makes Ethel Cain such a singular artist isn’t just the songwriting or the storytelling or even the aesthetic (though let’s be honest, she’s basically the patron saint of Southern Gothic now). It’s her total commitment to emotional truth, no matter how uncomfortable or polarising. Her music touches on death, guilt, faith, abuse, even cannibalism, and somehow, none of it feels exploitative. It feels necessary.

Some artists give you a glimpse into their mind. Cain gives you the key and dares you to open the cellar door. She doesn't just sing about trauma; she guides you through it, hand-in-hand, gently but unflinchingly. It's disturbing, but it's also healing in a strange way. There’s beauty in the brutal honesty.

“This was all for you.” That line lands like a tombstone: heavy, final, aching with devotion. But it also feels like a gift. Cain has given us a piece of herself, wrapped in thorns and lullabies, and asked us to hold it gently. So we do.

And we press play again.