Ethel Cain’s ‘Nettles’: An Eight-Minute Journey Through Heartache, Love, and Haunting Memory
“Nettles,” the haunting lead single from Ethel Cain’s upcoming album Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You, is a resurrection of a demo first shared online in 2021—a three-minute SoundCloud relic that’s now transformed into an eight-minute epic of soft devastation and dreamlike storytelling. Expanded with new lyrics and refined production, the track doesn't just revisit Cain’s past work—it deepens it, revealing a narrative spine that connects her new material back to the roots of Preacher’s Daughter.
From the first notes, the instrumental intro builds a vivid sense of place. Southern-gothic Americana—banjo, pedal steel, woodland fiddle—is tinged with a surreal unease, emphasized even more by Cain’s deliberate use of Twin Peaks-inspired synths. The atmosphere is thick, ghostly, and full of things unsaid. It's a landscape where “the greenery stings,” where nettles (jagged, stinging, herbaceous) become both metaphor and setting for a love story weighed down by memory and time.
Cain sings with a voice that slips between the real and the unreal, weaving a dreamscape that blurs war, trauma, and the fragility of intimacy. “The doctors gave you until the end of the night, but not till daylight,” she sings, gently introducing the idea that certain events of the song were imagined in a nightmare. There’s a cinematic eeriness to this kind of grief—one that doesn’t cry out, but drifts, dazed, between waking and sleeping.
In one of the most piercing lines, Cain sings: “It wasn't pretty like the movies, it was ugly like what they did to me. And they did to me what I wouldn't do to anyone.” Here, she reintroduces her history with abuse—without embellishment, without shock value. It’s simply fact, as cold and normalized as it’s become to her. Yet her refusal to inflict that pain on others speaks volumes to the quiet empathy that threads the song.
She continues, heartbreakingly aware of how love softens even the worst realities: “Tell me all the time not to worry. And think of all the time that I’ll have with you, when I won’t wake up on my own.” It’s a plea for comfort, not just from him, but from the possibility of her own waking life. Words, she suggests, don’t have to be true—they just need to be warm enough to ward off the cold of her dream.
The song also explores gendered pain with rare clarity. “I want to bleed, I want to hurt the way that boys do.” Here, Cain unearths a deep envy—not of masculinity, but of the emotional freedom often afforded to men. She wants to rage without being called hysterical, to be wounded without being made romantic. She wants her pain seen, not softened. It’s a quiet rebellion against the expectation that women must either hide their trauma or make it beautiful.
Later, she notes: “Maybe you’re right and we should stop watching the news. ‘Cause baby I’ve never seen brown eyes look so blue.” There’s tenderness here, but also foreboding, Cain captures the moment love begins to see its own ending. On a literal level, it could simply describe the harsh glow of the television casting a bluish tint on his face, making his brown eyes appear blue. But on a deeper level, it suggests the creeping presence of war in their lives—possibly alluding to his sense of duty, his eyes now reflecting the blue of patriotism. It may even be a quiet nod to “American Teenager,” where Cain previously examined the tension between youthful freedom and American militarism, suggesting that in this moment, she’s beginning to see the future in his eyes—and it’s already leaving her behind.
But “Nettles” doesn’t close in grief—it swells toward something almost transcendent. The final two minutes imagine a life untouched by violence, full of gardenias and wedding vows. “Think of us inside after the wedding.” Her vocals are uplifting—angelic and impossibly gentle—as she allows herself to believe in a future where their love survives. “Gardenias on the tile, where it makes no difference who held back from who.” The gardenia, a flower that symbolizes purity, gentleness, and innocence, becomes the symbol for a love that has transcended all past harm. In that imagined room, where blame has dissolved and the pain is behind them, Cain lets herself believe in peace—if only for a moment.
With “Nettles,” Ethel Cain proves once again that she isn’t simply writing songs—she’s crafting emotional archives. This is a track about memory, about war (both external and internal), and about the aching desire to be loved even when you're convinced all you bring is pain. To listen to “Nettles” is to wander through that stinging greenery with her, caught between what was, what could have been, and the quiet beauty of what still remains.