Bonnaroo 2024 Artist Spotlight: Ethel Cain

Like we’ve been doing for many years now, we’re making it our mission to help you get acquainted with many of our favorite acts from Bonnaroo‘s 2024 lineup. After roaring back to life in 2022, after two years off due to Covid and weather, and feeling fully like its old self again with a great fest last summer, this year marks Bonnaroo’s 21st installment (and 23rd anniversary), boasting not only another great and varied lineup, but also a continuation of some of the big changes and improvements rolled out over the last couple of years, with more flexibility in ticketing and camping, a reimagined “Outeroo” campground area, new activations, and further new ways to Roo. Back once again in its usual June 13-16 timeframe, we’re counting down the days until another great weekend on the farm.

As we dig through the entire schedule, we’ll highlight a spread of performers spanning across genres and stages, big and small, new and old, to bring you some of the most interesting, lesser-known, and most highly-recommended among this year’s crop of artists. And as our time at ‘Roo approaches, we’ll also be bringing you some special features and full list-style daily lineup guides, to help you plan your weekend ahead of the fest. While these previews won’t span every artist, and might omit some more obvious must-see acts, we hope they’ll serve as a way to help you navigate Bonnaroo’s gargantuan lineup, and to make the most of your busy weekend at the fest!

Grab your tickets right here if you haven’t already, and read on for our Bonnaroo Artist Spotlight!

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One of the most fascinating, musically and personally complex artists to emerge in recent memory, the story of Ethel Cain is deeply personal, occasionally morose, quintessentially American, and inherently contradictory one. And that’s merely Ethel Cain the person, rather than Ethel Cain the character, the tragic figure at the center of Ethel Cain’s bleak, semi-autobiographical, stylishly conceptual, Southern Gothic, cult masterpiece of a debut album, 2022’s Preacher’s Daughter. Raised in a deeply religious, homeschooled, small town environment in Northern Florida, Cain’s early exposure to music came in the form of church choir, classical piano, and Christian music. As a teen, she found her way to secular pop through artists like Florence and the Machine, and though her relationship to religion remains a complicated one, came out as gay at 12, left the church at 16, and left her family to branch out and live alone at 18, ultimately finding herself both as an artist and person, coming out as a trans woman at 20 and adopting the name Hayden Silas Anhedönia. Though she made music under various monikers a couple years earlier, 2019’s Carpet Bed was the first released as Ethel Cain, and the first taste of the ambient indie rock meets alt pop meets gothic folk meets slowcore sound that has earned her widespread critical acclaim and a fervent cult following. By 2021 third EP, Inbred, and its decisively poppy single “Crush,” Cain had begun to generate a lot of buzz within the industry, inking a major publishing deal and drawing acclaim from outlets like Pitchfork and Billboard. But it was the following year’s first full-length Preacher’s Daughter– the first in a planned trilogy of cinematic and ambitious concept albums- that cemented Ethel as one of the indie scene’s most compelling and important new fixtures, earning immediate praise upon release, and attracting a diehard following since. Loosely based on her own life, though a sort of imagined version of the bleakest direction it could’ve taken, the record focuses on a fictionalized version of Ethel Cain (itself a stage name, but also a character in song), who runs away from an oppressive religious upbringing, only to meet her fate at the hands of a cannibalistic psychopath. A flair for the macabre- both in subject matter and in aesthetic- has long permeated Cain’s ethos, though her songs themselves oscillate in sound from dreamy bedroom pop to propulsive heartland rock to ambient folk to the minimalist indie rock stylings of slowcore and beyond, in a way that’s nearly impossible to adequately label. And it’s that chameleon-like writing style, that fascinating personal story, not to mention her outspoken and occasionally controversial presence on social media, that has made Ethel Cain a cult figure indie rock, conjuring the larger-than-life presence of artists like Lana Del Rey. Though we’d prefer a late night set for optimal vibes, Ethel’s Bonnaroo debut is still sure to be one of the weekend’s most buzzed-about sets.

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