Somewhere between waking and dreaming, she emerges. Not so much a presence as a flicker—a wavering silhouette framed by the kind of light that doesn’t just illuminate but carves shapes into the darkness. Ethel Cain stands at the centre of the Roundhouse, and everything else—time, sound, the weight of the city outside—collapses inward. Her voice, suspended in the thick air, is both a whisper and a wound, unraveling slowly, an incantation laced with dust and nostalgia.
The opening chords of”Dust Bowl” don’t just settle in; they seep, crawling up from the floorboards like a slow, creeping fog. There’s something distant in the way she sings, as if remembering something too painful to hold directly. Sparse guitar echoes against the cavernous dome, each note stretching further than it should, dissolving before it reaches the walls. Her voice is an ache, drawing the audience into a kind of stillness that feels almost reverent. No cheers, no immediate movement—just eyes locked on her, as if waiting for permission to exhale.
It’s a strange kind of spell she casts. Not hypnotic in the traditional sense—this isn’t the lull of familiarity, the warm embrace of a song you’ve heard a thousand times before. It’s the kind of trance that grips you in a way you don’t quite understand, like déjà vu of a place you’ve never been. *Family Tree* creeps in next, shifting the space in a way that is almost imperceptible. The bass hums low, the air grows heavier, the crowd sways but barely moves. Cain herself barely moves, standing at the centre of it all like a ghost who never learned how to haunt properly. Her body is there, but her voice is somewhere else, stretching across vast, empty plains, lost in memory.
And then “Crush”, and the tension snaps—not violently, not in some explosive catharsis, but in the way a barely perceptible crack in a window suddenly gives way, splintering outward in a thousand tiny fractures. There’s a sharp inhale from the crowd, a shift forward, a ripple of something kinetic. It’s the closest thing to euphoria in this set, but even here, there’s restraint—desire laced with hesitation, a dance that never quite finds its rhythm. Cain sings like she’s half-reliving, half-exorcising something, and the audience mirrors it back to her, caught in the push-pull of her gaze, the tension of her breath between words.
Somewhere near the end, she covers “Bette Davis Eyes”, which should feel out of place, too slick, too polished for a set built on slow-burning wounds. But she strips it down, stretches it out, lets the melody bend until it feels like something she might have written herself. The playfulness of the original is gone, replaced with something weightier, more spectral. A song about an elusive woman becomes a song about loss—of self, of time, of things you don’t even remember having in the first place. It is less a cover, more a ghost of a song, refracted through a cracked mirror.
By the time “American Teenager” closes the set, there’s a sense of something having settled—an exhale, a slow return to consciousness. It’s the most grounded moment of the night, and yet it still hovers just slightly above reality, as if Cain herself is not quite willing to come back down yet. The crowd sings along, not in the way you belt out a chorus at the top of your lungs, but in the way you murmur to yourself late at night, half-conscious, half-dreaming.
And then—nothing. No grand exit, no final declaration, just the slow fade of reverb, the last remnants of sound clinging to the air before disappearing entirely. She walks off, and for a moment, no one moves. A pause, a suspended breath, as if waiting for something else to happen. But nothing does. The silence stretches. And then, as if on cue, the real world rushes back in, pulling everyone out of the strange, beautiful unraveling they’ve just witnessed.
Ethel Cain does not demand your attention—she takes it quietly, patiently, until you don’t even realize it’s gone. Until you wake up the next morning, a melody still caught in your throat, a feeling you can’t quite name still pressing at the edges of your skin. Until you realize that, somehow, you are still there, standing in that heavy, golden glow, waiting for something that was never meant to arrive.
Words & photos – Richard Isaac
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