“Family Tree (intro)” 

“Jesus can always reject his father / But he cannot escape his mother’s blood / He’ll scream and try to wash it off of his fingers / But you never escape what you’re made of”

As the album begins, we hear the sound of a muddled sermon read by an incoherent, slurring Southern drawl. After beats of silence, Ethel Cain, the daughter of a rural Alabama preacher, sings into the echoing darkness of an empty chapel. Her coarse wails and dazed, flat verses are backed by distant church bells, a pulsing drumbeat, and the dully buzzing reverb of electric guitar. The words of the opening song on this album allude to Cain’s own metaphorical crucifixion to the scrutiny of a broken family and a repressed, devout community. It drops off shortly after only three verses, a dark note of foreshadowing for the overall themes of the album and its later events sure to leave a bitter and fascinating taste in the listener’s mouth. 

“American Teenager”

“The neighbor’s brother came home in a box / But he wanted to go / So maybe it was his fault / Another red heart taken by the American dream” 

Opening with lustrous, triumphant guitar and Cain’s dreamy keening, the second song on the album pulls its listener out of the pitch-black chapel and into the golden hour of teenhood in a sleepy Southern town. With the backing of a steady drumbeat and high electric guitar strums, Cain’s soaring vocals recount an adolescence of angst and ecstasy lost to ethereal memory. Through the carefree cadence of the song, Cain reflects on the darker sides of American teenhood, patriotism, and tradition, while setting the scene and establishing the context of her character’s backstory for the events of the album. 

“A House in Nebraska”

“I’d kill myself to hold you one more time / And it hurts to miss you / But it’s worse to know / That I’m the reason you won’t come home” 

As we come down from the high of Cain’s coming-of-age ballad, dark, heavy piano notes strike into the silence like a funeral dirge. Cain returns to a low pitch, but fills her voice with mourning to lament the loss of a lover. The soft sound of rain, or perhaps the grazing of wheatfields fills the deep silence between notes through the first verse, and the raw, high sound of electric guitar pierces through the soft dullness of the song in its later verses, while Cain’s voice grows higher and more anguished. As she recounts the metaphor of her abandoned house in Nebraska, it feels as if the listener is there with her, smelling dust and rotten wood. As the song closes with a guitar solo, we feel the crescendo of Cain’s grief descend into a totally new chapter of her life and watch her turn her back on the past. 

“Western Nights”

“I’ll be screaming your name / Past the gas stations and trailing down the interstate / Please don’t love how I need you / And know that one day / You and I will be okay ”

Soft piano notes begin in a thick reverb as the song begins, and come into clear focus as Cain begins singing the story of her life on the run from that quaint, Southern town. Cain sings directly to her new lover, an outlaw on the run with her. The deep beat of the drum mimics a slowly beating heart, and the chorus is punctuated with rough guitar notes. After the first verse, as Cain’s quiet wails echo, the sound of a rushing highway plays in the background. The listener feels like they, too, are speeding down the highway, chasing faint streetlights and drifting asleep to the sound of traffic. As she and her lover drive into the horizon and chase a new life, Cain’s past shrinks away behind them. 

“Family Tree”

“These crosses all over my body / Remind me of who I used to be / And Christ forgive these bones I’m hiding / And the bones I’m about to leave”

The following songs manifest as if Cain is dreaming as she sleeps in the backseat of an outlaw’s car and drives away from her hometown. This song begins similarly to the album’s intro, its predecessor, but with an even drier and colder tone. As the lyrics diverge from the intro’s, the sound of a church organ echoes hollowly in the background. With the chorus, an electric guitar accompanies more church bells and Cain’s gravelly premonitions. Near the end of the song, her voice reaches a belting pitch and the unexpected wavering of a synthesizer trills in the background. Following the same themes as “Family Tree (Intro),” Cain returns to her upbringing in the church and proclaims her vengeance through a series of Biblical metaphors. 

“Hard Times”

“I’m tired of you / Still tied to me / Too tired to move / Too tired to leave” 

Descending deeper into the dream sequence, “Hard Times” opens with the soft ambient sounds of chirping crickets and buzzing cicadas behind Cain’s mellow humming. As she sings, the listener doesn’t hear the vengeful runaway of the album’s previous songs, but a younger and more tender version of her. While the theme of the song is unclear at first, the childhood memories Cain is recounting become more and more clear through the haze of dreamy, light reverb to reveal a terrible truth: Cain is singing earnestly to her own sexually abusive father, the preacher. Through the second half of the song, as it’s become clear what she is describing, Cain pleads with her father to leave her be, over and over, reminiscent of the repetitive cycle of abuse she endured for years as a child. As the song fades out slowly, Cain is both losing consciousness in her childhood bed and waking up as she continues down the path towards her future. 

“Thoroughfare” 

“In these motel rooms / I started to see you differently, oh / ‘Cause for the first time since I was a child / I could see a man who wasn’t angry”

The second act of the album begins with the mellow strumming of a guitar. Cain’s voice comes in low and slow, as she speaks to meeting another traveler along the road and hitching a ride with him as he drives towards the west. The crisp harmonica that comes in behind the second verse summons the sleepy contentment of the warmth of a clear, sunny day on the road. The days turn into nights as dreamy reverb sets in behind Cain’s drawl and she and Isaiah develop a deeper connection on their journeys toward a new life. Once intent on finding love in the West, Isaiah has now found love for Cain, who views him as the first man in her life who hasn’t wronged her. The end of the song is a drawn out scatting session and harmonica solo, reminiscent of the freedom Cain finds living in great open West with Isaiah, believing a new chapter of her life has begun. 

“Gibson Girl” 

“You came alone to me / From however far away / Asking me to know how I know / You’re all the same”

The tone has shifted again. The final strains of Cain’s scatting die out as deep, resonant guitar strums over a dark and buzzing reverb. When Cain starts singing, her voice is dry and flat, echoing and wavering with the sound of drums which flutter like a heartbeat. The chorus sees Cain recount, in a deep, sultry voice, where her new life in California has really taken her: forced prostitution at the hand of Isaiah. Under the influence, Cain is in a state of semi-consciousness, but a sense of high-pitched desperation breaks through her voice, like a plea to the audience to help her. The electric guitar shreds drily through the end of the song as Cain’s voice contorts with inebriation. As the song ends, a dark buzzing and humming become louder. 

“Ptolemaea” 

“Blessed be the children / Each and every one come to know their god through some senseless act of violence / Blessed be you, girl / Promised to me by a man who can only feel hatred and contempt towards you”

The deep voice of a man begins to hum resonantly into the silence of this song. He begins to speak over a thick, pulsing drumbeat. He declares cryptic omens as the sound of flies buzzing grows louder and louder. As his voice begins tripping and layering over itself and the other sounds of the song, we feel like Cain does, in a state of semi-consciousness, while Isaiah speaks to us. Cain sings in a high, fearful voice of Biblical allusions before the introduction of raw electric guitar to the background. The listener can hardly tell what Cain is saying, as her voice wavers and is lost beneath Isaiah’s. The music is deep and ominous in tone, as Cain is presumably being pursued and trying to evade Isaiah and his disturbing premonitions. As the beat of the song speeds up, we hear Cain pleading with him to stop, a refrain which crescendos with a guttural, raw shriek. Cain has been caught and is being killed by Isaiah, a man who she trusted but who proved to be taking advantage of her. The off-key shredding of a guitar buzzes more and more loudly until the end of the song, during which we hear the specter of death praying over Cain and the sound stops and starts like the murmur of a faltering heart. Cain’s death rattle ends the song.

“August Underground”

This first of two instrumental tracks is meant to represent the moments between Cain’s last breath and her crossing over into death. Her deep humming echoes through low, soft strums of guitar thick with buzzing static. The name of the song is a reference to a notorious horror movie from 2001. The resounding crack at the end of the track is meant to represent the slamming of a door as Isaiah leaves Cain to die. 

“Televangelism”

The second instrumental track sees Cain ascending to some kind of imagined afterlife like the heaven she was raised to anticipate visiting. With angelic, high piano notes, the tone of the song is light and pure after the dark attic floor of “August Underground” — as if the audience is meant to feel the relief that Cain must feel as she ascends to a state of painlessness and weightlessness. As the piano notes become more high and feverish at the end of the song, it feels like Cain is sprinting home to the comfort of the Biblical paradise she is so familiar with to enter the embrace of the God that she died trying to escape. The end of the song is corrupted and wavering, like an out-of-tune broadcast. 

“Sun Bleached Flies”

“What I wouldn’t give to be in Church this Sunday / Listening to the choir, so heartfelt, all singing / God loves you, but not enough to save you”

Cain returns to reflect on her life. The high, clear notes of a piano open the song before Cain begins to lament the life she has just left behind, through the metaphor of dead flies lying on a windowsill. She yearns for the familiar abuse of the church she grew up in, despite all the efforts she made to escape that life. She feels as if her faith has followed her, and craves the passive-aggressive disdain she faced at the hands of the church. As the song progresses, the emotional pitch in her voice crescendos, and she mourns the lost potential of her life while also trying to seek acceptance, falling back into her old role as a complacent woman of faith. At the end of the song, Cain sings in the pitch of a tearful mourner, looking back on her life and bidding farewell to the people she knew. The track ends with the same piano notes as in “Televangelism” and a wavering reverb. 

 “Strangers” 

“Can I be yours? Just tell me I’m yours / If I’m turning in your stomach and I’m making you feel sick / Am I making you feel sick?”

The final track on the album sees Cain recount what really happened to her after Isaiah killed her. It, like the first track on the album, opens with a murky recording of a sermon on the inevitability of death. Cain sings in a high, sweet voice to Isaiah directly, in metaphors about consumption and desire. The listener is meant to assume she is reflecting on their love affair. In the chorus, over keening guitar and Cain’s low humming, she begs Isaiah for affirmation that he loved her. She then goes on, over the dry strumming of acoustic guitar, to imagine her family looking for her while she rots in Isaiah’s attic. As the song progresses, the listener becomes gradually more aware of the connotations of Cain’s allegories — that she has been cannibalized by Isaiah. Over electric guitar, she now belts with a tone more resembling fury, inquiring to Isaiah whether she has been ‘making (him) feel sick’. The refrain reflects the theme of the whole album, Cain’s desperate fight for affirmation and ultimate Biblical sacrifice. As the song ends, she bids farewell to the life she knew and promises to see her mother after she dies.