Tonight’s sold-out show at London’s Eventim Apollo is one of five. That kind of run is usually reserved for blockbuster pop stars with fireworks and confetti drops. Instead, Ethel Cain uses it to stake her claim as something else entirely, an artist fully inhabiting a vision, rejecting pop norms in favour of mystery and defiance.
She hasn’t just entered pop’s mansion, she’s knocked down the walls and rebuilt it from the ground up. From the swirling intro of ‘Willoughby’s Theme’, the atmosphere is fully controlled. Darkness, smoke and sharp light wrap around the crowd as she opens with the pounding ‘Fuck Me Eyes’, met with screams so loud it feels like the walls could crack. ‘Nettles’ is panoramic and spellbinding, everyone locked in, wide-eyed and breathless.
This is a show that silences the room one moment and explodes into full-throated singalongs the next. The shoegaze noise-rock of ‘Dust Bowl’ hits like a slow-moving freight train. Everything is deliberate. Every move feels like theatre rather than just a gig, each piece part of a bigger, unfolding story.
The atmosphere is hard to describe. There’s a constant pull towards the stage, whether it’s the explosive final moments of ‘Tempest’ or the more ambient cuts from ‘
Perverts’. The set leans heavily on ‘
Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You’, delivered with pin-drop focus. ‘Waco, Texas’ builds into a widescreen crescendo that feels like it’s shaking the rafters.
But it’s the encore that flips the script. ‘Thoroughfare’, introduced as one of Ethel’s favourites, unravels into a scorching rock track that blows open everything that came before. Then comes ‘American Teenager’, a full-throttle anthem that sends the room into chaos, every word screamed back, every hand in the air.
It’s a closing statement that underlines the split at the heart of Ethel Cain’s magic: huge ambition delivered with razor-sharp intent. She’s redefining what a pop artist can be, and doing it entirely on her own terms. If she wanted the crown, she could take it. Instead, she pulls the American Dream through the dirt and the nettles, reshaping it into something tangled, honest and powerful.
Impossible to predict and utterly engrossing, Ethel Cain’s place in the modern music playground has never been more needed.
