Ethel Cain – Auckland Town Hall: February 13, 2026 (13th Floor Concert Review)
Lana Del Ray casts a long shadow. On one end of what I’m going to name “the Lana Spectrum” there’s the pure pop of Addison Rae’s Diet Pepsi, with its hazy, breathy lyrics and Americana imagery. And on the opposite end of the spectrum there’s the hazy, Southern Gothic dream-pop of Ethel Cain, specifically her two “proper” studio albums, Preacher’s Daughter and last year’s Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You.
Cain has cited Del Rey as an influence, and it’s hard not to Cain’s music as both an homage and a reaction to Del Rey’s Born to Die – both the song and the aesthetic of faded diners, motel curtains lit by sodium streetlights, gas stations at dusk and small-town churches with cracked paint. If Lana gives you the mythic, cinematic America – old Hollywood, convertibles and doomed romance – then Ethel drags you deeper into the rural South, riffing on evangelical trauma, generational grief and empty highways passing through forgotten towns..
I’m at the first of two sold out Auckland Town Hall shows tonight. It’s a packed house of polite, mostly twenty-somethings, mostly women, and though Ethel Cain’s queer-friendly musical themes probably overlap pretty heavily with recent visitor Chappell Roan, there’s a distinct lack of pink-glitter cowboy hats on show. And, my god it’s HOT in the Town Hall. Does this venue even have air conditioning?
Support comes from Elliot and Vincent. The last time I saw this Auckland duo they were opening for the Pixies, and they’re possibly a slightly rowdier opener than I’d expect given the headliner, but the crowd eats them up, and they do an excellent job of hyping up the punters.
It’s just after 9pm when Cain and co. emerge from the thick cloud of dry ice that is going to be a constant for the bulk of tonight’s gig. The four piece band is evenly spaced out around the edges of the stage and, in keeping with Cain’s Southern aesthetic, in the centre of the stage is what can only be described as a pulpit – an elevated platform bearing a massive cross. Cain bounds out onto the stage, her long hair held back by a baseball cap, wearing baggy jeans, an even baggier tee shirt and a pair of combat boots. And it’s straight into Sunday Morning from the Golden Age EP, all drone and martial drumming, followed immediately by bona-fide hit American Teenager. The remainder of the show follows this pattern, mixing extended pieces of droney, Southern Gothic shoegaze with (slightly) poppier material.
Cain’s music – a few killer singles like American Teenager and Fuck Me Eyes excluded – is mostly all about “the vibe”. It’s dark and murky, like floating in some kind of sensory deprivation chamber (or, as Radiohead put it, “like a pig in a cage on antibiotics”.) The stage setup reflects this – it’s mostly dark, the colours are muted to the point where you could fool yourself into thinking you’re watching an old sepia-toned film, and the dry ice never lets up. This all sounds kinda gloomy on paper, but Ethel Cain seems genuinely excited to be here – it’s the band’s first live show in months – and when she’s not roaming the stage she’s down in the pit or holding her mic out over the audience for call-and-response vocals.
The set-proper concludes with Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You’s penultimate song, Tempest – a long, slow dirge, followed immediately by the triumphant Crush, described by Cain as “the slowest, saddest one ever”. But, with a crowd this enraptured, an encore is inevitable, and we end with a one-two punch of Strangers and the countryfied Thoroughfare, both from Preacher’s Daughter. (Cain described Saturday’s show as “the second show”, and I’m curious about whether she’ll play a completely different set, given the lack of a few songs, notably the epic Fuck Me Eyes, which I was disappointed not to hear.)
On Thursday night I was packed into a tiny room watching New York shoegazers A Place to Bury Strangers pound their audience into submission with a wall of sound so loud I could feel the kick drum in my chest cavity. Tonight’s Ethel Cain show has almost the opposite – using a wall of sound that was so intimate that it enveloped me and made me feel like I was floating heavenward.
Lawrence Mikkelsen
Click on any image to view a photo gallery by Azrie Azizi
Ethel Cain:
