Into the Abyss With Ethel Cain

One of the most intriguing rising artists in pop found her freedom by inventing dark, twisted stories - and she's got lots more to come

- By Julyssa Lopez. Photographs by Nedda Afsari

Lately, for Hayden Silas Anhedönia, time feels like a slippery concept. If she’s not playing shows halfway across the world, she’s usually tucked away in her bedroom, a quiet hideaway in Pittsburgh with a sloped roof that doubles as a portal to another world.

Here, the hours glide by, one after the other. She might spend 12, 13, even 14 hours trapped inside, leaning over her computer, lost in the expansive sounds she’s creating. “You’ll get up at 9am to start working, and then you’re like, ‘Oh, what time is it?’ It’s 4am the next day,” she says. “But it’s fun — and insane and frustrating, and it makes me want to rip my hair out.”

Getting into this private lair, where Anhedönia, 25, has lived since last autumn, feels a little bit like navigating an M.C. Escher lithograph. From the outside, her house looks lean and narrow, but inside, staircases jut out of unexpected corners, rising higher and higher. Vintage heirlooms and random odds and ends are strewn about; there’s an entire wooden church pulpit she found, rustic little trunks plucked from charity shops, a lifesize cutout of Susan Sarandon. She’s created different versions of this home as she’s moved through different locales — a small house in Alabama last year, a former church in Indiana before that — each taking on the haunted, magical quality of antique emporiums filled with esoteric artifacts. People tend to be fascinated by Anhedönia’s things, and she likes showing them off: all these sundry bits of the life she’s built while breaking through as Ethel Cain, one of the most intriguing pop artists of the past couple of years.