Description

On her debut album, the 24-year-old Tallahassee native briefly makes good on her instinct for mass-appeal pop anthems, but most of the 76-minute album dwells on roiling gloom and smoldering Americana.

Like Inbred, Preacher’s Daughter, Cain’s full-length debut, places its catchiest pop salvo up front. With its heartland-rock pomp and beaming guitars, “American Teenager” plays like something off Taylor Swift’s Speak Now, a taste of the kind of mass-appeal anthems Cain could make if she opted to commit to that route. The rest of the record, though, makes clear she has no interest in that. For the bulk of the album’s heady 76 minutes, she turns her back on pop in favor of roiling gloom and smoldering Americana. If “American Teenager” didn’t so efficiently introduce the album’s motifs—disenfranchised youth, hard living, and misplaced ideals—it’d be a complete fakeout.

— Pitchfork