ETHEL CAIN

crushes on girls, I had crushes on boys,” she says. “And I didn’t even really know what that meant.” Her neighborhood was small and full of old ladies, as she describes it, and she’d noticed that people treated one of her neighbors, a gay man who lived in town, differently. “I started to get this inkling in my head at some point as I was approaching adolescence, like, ‘Is that not allowed?’ ” So when she was about 11 years old, she turned to her parents with an innocent query. “I thought I was just going to be like, ‘Hey … I have a question.’ ” This is often painted as Anhedönia’s coming-out story, but the truth is, she was just a kid asking about something she didn’t fully understand. “I was like, ‘I think I like boys.’ ”

In a community obsessed with upholding puritanical ideals they believed would keep the devil at bay, all hell broke loose, she says. Families from her church would tell her mom that Anhedönia couldn’t play with their kids. Her parents sent her to therapy. Her life grew even lonelier and darker, cascading into several years that she now says she hardly remembers — in between home-school lessons, she spent most of her time in bed with the curtains drawn. “Living in that environment, you just want to get out of it,” she says. “I remember just kind of locking away parts of myself and thinking, ‘You’re going to wake up, you’re going to eat, you’re going to deal with whatever happens today, you’re going to go to sleep, and then you’re going to keep doing that until this is over.’ ”

At 16, she started taking classes at a community college, then went to school to become a nail technician at 18. By then, she’d flown out the door and started living on her own in Tallahassee, indulging in her new freedom. She experimented with acid, opioids, Xanax, meth once. “When you come from such an oppressive upbringing, you tend to spiral for a moment,” she admits. It was right around then that the idea of Ethel Cain began blossoming in her mind.

She found other answers, too. “It wasn’t until I was nearing adulthood when I discovered what being trans was, through Tumblr of all places,” she recalls. “I didn’t even know you could do that. I didn’t know that was a thing.” Up until then, her church had told her she was gay. The actual identity she came to understand for herself “wasn’t even in the conversation in any way,” she continues. “Wrong letter.”

Anhedönia is careful when she talks about being trans, emphasizing that her gender identity is only one fact in a complex personality. “When you are trans, you are living a very specific experience that not many other people in the world have,” she says. “I wanted to not be known as a trans artist, I think, not because I didn’t want people to know I was trans, or because I didn’t want to be proud of that fact, but.… It has shaped the way that I am in certain ways, but it’s not everything.”

She shared the news with her sister when she was 20, posted about it on Facebook, and simply told her mother she was starting hormone therapy. It was a more straightforward conversation than the one she’d had at age 11, and she was met with far more support. Even now, Anhedönia is cautious about revealing her past, aware that people conflate the darkness of her fiction with her real life. She’s also protective of her family, who she’s in a much better place with: All of them have left the church at this point, though several are still religious in their own ways.

“I always toe the line of not wanting to dredge it up,” she says. “But I get so caught up in the fantasy and the fun of making a story that I forget that there are real-world reasons that I do what I do.”

WHEN ANHEDÖNIA BEGAN uploading her music online, she connected with musicians like the singer-songwriter Nicole Dollanganger, known for nightmarish-dream pop, and Lil Aaron, a rapper who also grew up in a deeply Christian family. She opened for Dollanganger and gained followers with songs like the gossamer-light “Bruises.” Then Lil Aaron introduced her to some people at a publishing company called Prescription Songs. It was the middle of the pandemic, and she says she’d just lost her job doing nails in Tallahassee. The company offered her a deal, and Anhedönia took it — connecting her on paper to Prescription Songs’ owner, Dr. Luke, the producer Kesha accused of rape, psychological torment, and emotional abuse in a lawsuit she filed in 2014. (He vehemently denied her claims and countersued for defamation; Kesha’s cases were all dropped or dismissed, and this June, after a decade-long court battle, they reached a settlement in which Kesha said that “only God knows what happened that night.”)

Anhedönia knew who Dr. Luke was, but she says she wasn’t aware of the allegations against him when she first signed. “I didn’t do a lot of digging until way further down the line,” she says. “I was like, ‘Oh.’ ” Once she knew, she continues, “I just decided, ‘I’m here now and can’t really go anywhere for a while. So I’m just going to mind my business and make my music.’ But if I had my choice, I would much prefer to do business with somebody else. I’ll just say that.”

The Prescription Songs deal came during a desperate time for her. “I was broke,” she says. “I was literally going to the hospital because I was malnourished, and I was passing out all the time. My landlord was sending me angry texts every day because I was behind on rent. I was like, ‘I need money,’ and I signed.”

She emphasizes that she’s been in charge of the creative process for everything she’s released through Prescription. (Dr. Luke isn’t credited on any of her songs.) For now, she’s focused on finishing the next few releases she needs to fulfill her contract. “We’re almost out,” she says. “But yeah, if I could go back in time and do it differently, I probably wouldn’t put my name on that paper.”

There’s a sense in which it’s hard to imagine Anhedönia being contained by any music-business paperwork, because of just how expansive her imagination is, and just how much she wants to do. Before Ethel Cain came to her, she’d been sketching out three characters: Teddy, an androgynous altar boy with a vigilante streak; Salem, a woodsy witch with long white hair; and Carter, a time-traveler with a portal in his basement. Then Ethel Cain came along. “I knew it was going to be music, but I was like, ‘Can I write a story? Can I make a film? I want to draw this,’ ” she says. “I’m so obsessed with this story. I want to tell it in a million different ways.”

Later this year, she plans to leave Pittsburgh. She’s chasing brutal winters to match the tone of her next full-length album, which she describes as dark and cold. It’ll focus on the story behind Ethel’s mother, and see her grappling with her daughter’s death. The one after that will dive into Ethel’s grandmother.

There are other characters lurking in her head, waiting to come out — but she still thinks she has a lot of time to spend with the Cain women, and a long time before she reaches the end of the story. “This is going to be 15, 20 years from now,” she says. “I work very slow. That’s how I like it.”