Getting Back In Touch With My Attention Span
On Ethel Cain's new album and pop music's current aversion for long songs
Throughout the 2020s in music so far, we’ve seen both songs and albums increasingly getting shorter and shorter. As people’s ability to concentrate for very long dwindles due to the dominance of algorithmic short-form content and our collective addictions to our phones, artists seem to be catering to this universal brainrot through the lengths of their new releases. We’ve seen this particularly happen with Gen Z artists, which makes sense, since our generation grew up with technology and most of us have been online in some capacity for at least half of our lives at this point. I myself, an extremely young and gorgeous Gen Z-er, have noticed my attention span wane over the last couple of years, and that’s translated to my media consumption habits. Enter the antidote to our dwindling focus skills: the current mother of Southern Gothic alt-indie pop, Ethel Cain.
I listened to the entirety of Ethel Cain’s sophomore album Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You, which dropped last week, during a flight on Friday night, and I can’t think of a better setting to have listened to it for the first time in. The album is cinematic, and takes you on a quiet, brooding journey that is meant to be paid attention to at every turn. These are not songs to passively listen to, so I was grateful that my phone was on airplane mode for my first full listen to not be able to distract myself by reading tweets or scrolling Instagram stories. At face value, this album could be seen as a tough sit; Ethel lets these songs stretch out and breathe for minutes on end without change, which can feel uncomfortable when you’re used to listened to songs that are wrapping up at the 2 and a half minute mark. It also doesn’t help that this album has three completely instrumental interludes, and it is 73 minutes long over 10 tracks, making the average song length over 7 minutes (shoutout to math!). The last two songs are 10 and 15 minutes long, respectively, which combined are longer than the entirety of PinkPantheress’s most recent mixtape1. This album is so anti-short song that I have to respect it, even if not all of it is something I can see myself listening to all the time.
I also must add that I do enjoy short songs, and I like the forward-thinkingness of bite-sized pop music that comes and goes before you can even fully take it in; I simultaneously appreciate Ethel’s artistry for not feeding into our culture’s desire for instant gratification, which she counteracts so much that sometimes I found my mind wandering amidst the minutes-long instrumental sections of the album. Some of the interludes were hard for me to get through as a victim of our aforementioned universal brainrot (and because sorry, but I listen to music for vocals and lyrics. I listen to singers!), and I’m still sinking my teeth into this music, which is typical of Ethel’s songwriting. While she does have the ability to write incredible hooky pop songs like “American Teenager” from her last album and the excellent “Fuck Me Eyes” on this one, most of her music takes a Socratic Seminar-level approach to really grasp it. As a lover of the typical simple 3-minute verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-final chorus structure, this music is challenging to me in ways both exciting and somewhat exhausting. It’s easy to get lost in the muck here, but the high points are so glorious that it makes it all worth it. I particularly love the song “Dust Bowl”, as well as the aforementioned last song, “Waco, Texas”, in all 15 minutes of its depressing glory. I’m also currently visiting family in my suburban hometown, so you already know these songs have been on repeat while anxiously walking and driving around the empty streets at 9:00pm.
In many ways, I find Ethel to be a cultural and musical successor to Lana Del Rey. This is not a new theory, as Ethel’s debut album Preacher’s Daughter received many Lana comparisons due to both its Americana imagery and the avant-garde2 nature with which Ethel sings about sex and love. However, on this album, I notice Ethel following in the wake of Lana in a new way. Ethel is making music that is inherently countercultural, because the length of her songs are antithetical to current pop music trends, similar to how Lana was countercultural when she first arrived on the scene because she wasn’t pandering to the pop trends of singing over an EDM beat or empowering listeners by telling them that they were a firework. Lana was met with a lot of friction upon arriving to the pop scene because of how different the music she was making was from the rest of the charts, and with that friction came a cult following (and about a million reblogs of the Ultraviolence album cover on Tumblr); I will be curious to see if Ethel’s alternative approach to song structure and length will continue to build her own cult following she’s amassed over the last couple of years. It’s impressive to me how Ethel, being 27 and as Gen Z as I am, can create a space for herself in the pop ecosystem that defies the streamable expectations music executives are vying for right now. In an age of artists forgoing bridges altogether and releasing songs with only a couple verses and choruses, Ethel responds to that by saying “fuck it, let me release a song that has absolutely no structure whatsoever and lasts longer than that YouTube essay you’re watching about why Labubus represent our culture of overcompensation.”3
While Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You doesn’t have the repeated listenability of other music from this year, I appreciate that it purports to go against the grain (whether intentional or not) and create art that is inherently stretched out during a time where songs are designed to, and are valued by their ability to, be streamed over and over again. And if we can gleam anything from Lana’s decade-plus cult success, this tactic will bode very well for Ethel in the long run. I don’t have much else to add here, because let’s face it: asking you to read a newsletter for more than 5-10 minutes in this day and age of short attention spans is just cruel.
Other Recent Releases I’m Gagging Over
IMMATERIAL! - “buy you flowers”
In case you missed my newsletter about some of my favorite pop releases of 2025 so far, IMMATERIAL! is an emerging Brooklyn-based queer pop duo, and they also happen to be my two closest friends! Their new song is so good and is giving us that gorgeous end-of-summer banger that we’ve been missing out on in the Song of the Summer Drought we’re currently living through. It’s got a sexy beat and even sexier lyrics; if you like Troye Sivan’s “Rush”, you will love this song. Both my mother and my 18-month-year old nephew have danced to this song in the car, so you can guarantee it connects with all ages. I highly recommend putting it on your party playlists for the rest of August and finishing out your summer with a bang!
Amaarae - BLACK STAR
I got into Amaarae during her last album release, the very sexy and very bisexual Fountain Baby, and this new album, BLACK STAR is an excellent follow-up by being equally sexy and even more bisexual. It features great collabs, including songs with Bree Runway, PinkPantheress, and Naomi Campbell (who apparently is on a tour of giving fierce spoken word features this year), and is a wonderful 45 minutes of sexy party music. She’s also clearly in touch with her fellow LGBTs, because one of the choruses on this song is just her repeating “ketamine, coke, and molly” over and over again; okay queen, take it there! This album, similar to the IMMATERIAL! song mentioned above, is a great soundtrack to finish the summer to if you’re also looking for music to help you push off the dread of September.
Song of the Week
Lorde - “400 Lux”
As I mentioned, I’m visiting my hometown this week, and nothing makes me age regress more than listening to this song while driving through the endless neighborhoods of suburban Michigan. The lyric “I love these roads where the houses don’t change/where we can talk like there’s something to say” is forever etched into the mind of the 13-year-old gay boy who first heard it. It carries a nostalgia that is hard to describe; when I hear it in my 25-year-old ears these days, my teenage years play out in my head like a coming-of-age movie (and in my head, it’s of course much more interesting than the try-hard-theatre-kid reality of my teenager self). Been majorly listening to this one on a loop this week!
That’s all this week! If you’ve gotten all the way to this point, thank you for reading this post. Subscribe to this newsletter if you care about that sort of thing or follow me on Twitter or Instagram if you care about that sort of thing. Also, if you’re liking what you’re reading in these posts so far, consider sharing this publication with the other pop lovers in your life! I’ll see you again next week for more gay debauchery. Ciao!
Which I also love, just for the record. This is merely to put the length of these songs into perspective.
read: intense and sometimes violent