Common Ground: Connecting Ethel Cain and Yung Kayo
It's often said that music is a universal language. Considering the immense variety within one Spotify Daylist, though, or how appalling ‘coworker music’ can seem, this is not always so easy to believe; after all, if we’re all speaking the same language, shouldn’t we understand each other? To probe the issue, Signpost has tasked their most monolingual writers, Cara and Danny, to exchange albums from their sonically opposing music rotations, in an attempt to find Common Ground. For today, Cara will be listening to DFTK by Yung Kayo, a psychedelic trap-dubstep screamo mumble rap album, released as a debut in 2022. It’s a far cry from Danny’s listen for the day, Preacher’s Daughter by Ethel Cain, a 2022 slowcore Americana concept album exploring religious trauma and gender-based abuse. Both albums are already dearly loved by their recommenders, but can their differences be reconciled to find a place in the other side’s playlist?
Here’s what they have to say.
Cara
When I first sat down to listen to DFTK (an abbreviation of "Down For The Kount"), by Yung Kayo, I had no idea what to expect. And neither did my friends, who were also subjected to my experiment due to the fact that we were all packed into the same car on the way to Glasgow for a comedy show. My friend Rob was nice enough to give me the aux, and I had a job to do.
As the opening chords of "down (one kount)" began to ring out, I was transported.
There are some things that immediately stand out about DFTK. There's its distinct production style, mostly containing dreamy synths and drowned-out, autotuned ad-libs over a trap beat. There's Yung Kayo's voice itself, with its impressive flow and less-than-clear enunciation. And then there are the lyrics, which range from fairly clever to amusingly ridiculous.
Some of the songs bled into one another on the first listen, but others stood out immediately: "believer", with its repeated refrain of "she on me" – which with Young Kayo's enunciation sounds more like "shit on me" – is one of the more memorable (and best) tracks. The beat on "everything new" is distinct and catchy as hell. "YEET" and "hear you", featuring Yeat and Eartheater respectively, are super solid. "freak" is great, too, though it does contain a line about "hitting in her artery", presumably during sex, which I'm still quite puzzled about. And the closing track, "it's a monday", is genuinely awesome – the highlight of the album in my opinion.
Some other standout lines from the album include "I live in a big house (big)", "she spin on the dick like a fidget", and "your homeboy, he run out of oxygen / me and my bitch, we keep doing the opposite"; I'm not entirely sure what that one means, either, but it feels like a biting insult. I enjoyed the whole experience thoroughly.
As I listened once, and listened again, to DFTK, I kept Preacher's Daughter in the back of my head, determined to find a way to relate the albums to one another. As different as they are, if music is a universal language, then surely there's something collectively significant to be understood from both.
This brings me to the larger point of this whole project: common ground. Danny and I purposefully chose albums we not only loved, but which were as different as we could possibly make them, with the intention not only of expanding our own music tastes but of challenging ourselves to find some meaningful common thread between the two.
Obviously, Preacher's Daughter features a far heavier subject matter overall, as it chronicles the fictional character Ethel Cain's abuse, kidnapping, murder, and eventual succumbence to cannibalism. In comparison, DFTK at first glance looks like nothing more than a collection of fun songs about sex and money. But it's not nearly so simple. While not devaluing Hayden Anhedönia's (the artist behind the Ethel Cain persona) incredible worldbuilding or the difficult subjects she explores, the quality of her album does not drag down the quality of DFTK. It, too, is a feat of impressive production and songwriting; and that may sound patronising, but I genuinely mean it. A song having catchy production is not a detriment, and slowcore does not always equal substance.
Sometimes, I'm in the mood to sit down and listen to all 76 minutes of Preacher's Daughter, including the nine-and-a-half-minute-long "Thoroughfare", two instrumental tracks, and the songs about childhood sexual abuse and cannibalism. Other times, I'm not. Other times, I just want to put something on that I can bob my head to during a six hour library session. And that's no less of a valid reason to enjoy music.
What's more, Yung Kayo's album sounding more upbeat and high-energy doesn't mean it, too, doesn't delve into some more serious themes, which takes me back to the issue of common ground. Both albums contain themes of mourning past loves and an imagined future with another person. Both detail experiences of being taken advantage of by someone they thought they could trust. Both artists describe feeling lost, afraid, and unanchored. Yung Kayo's album cannot be explained away as "fun songs about sex and money" any more than Preacher's Daughter could be explained away as "slow songs about hitchhiking in the American South".
Yung Kayo was 18 years old when he dropped DFTK, a high-quality, genre-merging album with catchy instrumentation and a distinct sound. It's exciting to imagine where he'll go from here, as his career is just beginning.
My top five songs on the album have been added to my playlist. "it's a monday", in particular, I've revisited half a dozen times since my first listen. And yet this is a project that never would've been on my radar if not for this silly little idea. There's something beautiful and meaningful about that, probably.
Danny
Yo I am fucked right up right now dude. I can’t believe the first time I half-listened to this I compared "Hard Times" to "Ceilings" by Lizzy McAlpine. Once I ran back through it with Genius open I felt like I'd been shaken awake from some coma that’d lasted several years.
Having grown up on Long Island in the LISK era when the Suffolk County police commissioner was accused of having snuff films in his car really drilled this album home for me. On like a level of approach, I guess I was sort of unenthusiastic about the heavy reverb on the first few tracks when I listened initially, and things only really started to click once I got to "Hard Times", but now it’s all making sense.
This shit is a trip man. It’s so visual—it’s all so clear. I can just—not really picture but like I know the story so clearly from such vague tracks, especially like "Gibson Girl." "Ptolomea" scared the shit out of me too. I love it. I mean, there’s so much here, and I think it gave me some things to like ponder in life and hopefully grow from.
With albums like this, I just wind up wondering how the fuck they did it. Like did she know exactly what she was doing when she wrote all these songs, or does she go back to make sure they tie together so intricately after she got the whole thing planned out, or does she just write them and by some like possession by the ghost of Ethel Cain—or maybe by divine intervention but that seems insensitive—they all just wind up connecting? I don’t know, but I loved the guitar on "Hard Times", the solo on "Gibson Girl" made me lose my shit, and this whole thing has made me feel much more sour on humanity; but it also sort of reinforces the comfort that I find, theoretically, in death, that maybe I get from my Catholic upbringing.
There must be some esoteric references I’m still missing, too, but her flip of the Beatitudes was fucking ingenious, and the visualizers are so perfect, and this whole thing—I mean come on. It’s also so so very American. My mother is the only person in my immediate family who grew up in a somewhat rural, though still kind of suburban, environment (shout out Fox Lake, Illinois). So to faintly recognize the same guitar arpeggio as "Don’t Stop Believing", a song that epitomizes her communication of her high school experience to me, on "American Teenager", was just like–dude something in this is beyond human capability. As if this weren’t an album that somebody wrote (although it was, and for how unbelievable that is, all credit is due to Hayden Silas Anhedönia), but an album that like came into being out of poetic necessity after America existed for so long.
Even though Yung Kayo’s lyrics seem less painstaking, I think the way he manoeuvres melodies can be just as engaging as a sharp line sometimes. And there really may be some thematic throughline with these.
Both Ethel Cain and Yung Kayo are sort of chasing the American dream, and Yung Kayo is (or was) literally an American teenager. For him it’s working out, and he’s the one objectifying women rather than the one being objectified. But even on a "winning" side of this chase, the gaps that remain on songs where he’s almost whimpering “baby where are you” make it clear that, while they process their journeys toward the American dream differently, there’s something in the chase itself that’s synonymous with pain and discontent.
However, I definitely reassessed the way I listen to music after listening to Preacher’s Daughter. When I first heard DFTK I would ruminate on it for ages just listening to the sounds. But when I tried to listen to the lyrics, I realised that I don’t think I, or anyone else, actually knew what the hell this guy was saying sometimes. Looking at the first song’s lyrics on Genius, for instance, it feels like they just can’t be right. And while I think that’s dope—there is something very raw about feeling somebody’s singing so deeply without even knowing what they said—that sort of thing helps me when I don’t really know what I’m going through, or I’m not ready to engage it. When it’s time to take a sober reassessment, it’s not quite as productive.
As Ethel Cain, Anhedönia communicates her experience, or at least this fictionalized experience, with full command of the narrative and the emotions at play—which I think is important for real reflection. Sometimes I’ll listen to a lot of emo music that, once I’m not actively wading in self-pity, just sounds whiney. With an album as careful as Preacher’s Daughter, you get the full picture before you’re ready to process it, so in that sense it kind of happens the same way. But then when you go back to pick it apart—or piece it together, or maybe both I don’t know—you can find resolutions and maybe even answers woven into the songs themselves.
I do think there’s more craftsmanship to Preacher’s Daughter in that it seems more intentionally assembled; but the seeming lack of premeditation is exactly what makes DFTK important and great in its own right, and if Yung Kayo had some like dense conscious lyricism squeezed into these songs it’d probably ruin the tone of the album anyway. Still, there’s definitely craftsmanship in Yung Kayo’s work, but it comes with each passing moment, in song movements and synth layers and emphasis on certain bars, rather than as a very intricate web of like poetic clues that hide the true face of God or whatever.