Ethel Cain - Toronto 2025

Ethel Cain brought her haunting and atmospheric Willoughby Tucker Forever Tour to Toronto's Queen Elizabeth Theatre on September 15, 2025. The performance was part of a two-night Toronto run, with shoegaze-influenced band 9Million opening both evenings. Cain was touring behind Willoughby Tucker, I'll Always Love You, her ambitious second album and a prequel to 2022's Preacher's Daughter.

The Queen Elizabeth Theatre was a particularly fitting setting for Cain's music. Her performances rely heavily on atmosphere, tension, slow-building arrangements, and dramatic shifts in intensity. Rather than feeling like a conventional pop concert, the Toronto show had the quality of an immersive theatrical performance, with Cain creating a dark and often unsettling world around the songs.

The set opened with “Willoughby's Theme,” followed by “Janie,” “Fuck Me Eyes,” and “Willoughby's Interlude.” “Nettles” and “Dust Bowl” continued the focus on the new album, allowing much of the first half of the concert to function as a live presentation of Cain's latest musical era.

“Punish” was one of the night's most intense moments. The performance incorporated elements of “Perverts” and “Housofpsychoticwomn,” while “Onanist” similarly incorporated material from “Pulldrone.” These transitions emphasized Cain's increasingly experimental side and made the performance feel less like a collection of individual songs and more like one continuous piece.

The latter portion of the show moved through “A Knock at the Door,” “Radio Towers,” “Tempest,” and “Waco, Texas.” The set demonstrated how much Cain's musical world had expanded since Preacher's Daughter, incorporating ambient textures and heavier experimental passages alongside the more melodic material that first attracted her audience.

The encore was where the Toronto crowd got some of Cain's most recognizable material. “A House in Nebraska,” “Crush,” and “American Teenager” brought the main portion of her catalog into the performance, with “American Teenager” providing a particularly strong closing moment.

Cain returned to the Queen Elizabeth Theatre the following night, but that September 16 performance ended early because of illness. The September 15 show therefore stands as the fuller of the two Toronto performances, running through 16 songs compared with the shortened second-night set.

For Toronto fans, the September 15 concert offered a fascinating snapshot of Ethel Cain at a major transition point. She was no longer simply the artist behind the cult success of Preacher's Daughter. With Willoughby Tucker, I'll Always Love You and the experimental Perverts behind her, Cain was pushing her music into stranger, darker, and more ambitious territory. At the Queen Elizabeth Theatre, that evolution made for a concert that was atmospheric, unpredictable, and unlike almost anything else on the 2025 touring calendar.