Lana Del Rey And Ethel Cain’s Feud, Explained

Lana Del Rey and Ethel Cain have a shared fascination with all things Americana. Their visuals and sounds are steeped in vintage, faded glamour, rural decay, heartbreak, and beauty. You’d think they’d find common ground and get along.

The Background 

Cain, a trans singer whose 2022 debut Preacher’s Daughter cemented his place in the indie landscape, has bristled at the idea of being cast as a “goth Lana,” telling i-D that while he admired her music, it was “lazy writing” to reduce the expansive work of two female artists to a mirror image of one another. Over time, what began as an occasional irritation for Cain appears to have hardened into a mutual frostiness that, this month, finally spilled into public view.

On August 13, when Del Rey posted an Instagram Reel from the driver’s seat of her car, a snippet of an unreleased track was playing over the speakers. She opens with, “Ethel Cain hated my Instagram post / Think it’s cute reenacting my Chicago pose,” before landing on the line she repeats like a chorus, “The most famous girl at the Waffle House.” Fans immediately recognized the callback to a 2022 New York Times profile titled “The Most Famous Girl at the Waffle House,” which chronicled Cain’s vision of becoming a different kind of pop star from his home in rural Alabama. The lyric also ties back to Del Rey’s own brief stunt the following year, when she worked a shift at a Waffle House in Alabama, a move many now suspect was an intentional nod, if not a jab. The track, “All About Ethel,” had circulated in fragments online for over a year, but this was the most complete version yet, confirmed as track 13 on her forthcoming album.

Cain’s public reply was quick. Hours later, he posted to Instagram Stories, “update: lana del rey has blocked ethel cain on instagram.”

Fan-curated timelines trace the conflict further back. Old tweets believed to be Cain's responded to comments shading Del Rey. One fan tweeted, "lana del rey walked so ethel cain could run." According to screenshots, Cain responded, "i pushed her over when i ran past." He later added, "she'll never catch up to me in her macy's dress."

In 2022, Cain allegedly edited his own Wikipedia page (which he had originally created) to remove mentions of Del Rey as an influence, with multiple revisions erasing her name. That same year, he posted photos with musician Jack Donoghue, Del Rey’s ex, at a dam, captioned, “ok wait my turn,” a post seen as mirroring Del Rey’s earlier picture with Donoghue outside a prison.

Del Rey later described what she saw as the more serious reason for her discomfort. In a comment under a Pop Base Instagram post, she alleged that before they had ever interacted, Cain repeatedly mocked her appearance online. She wrote, “I didn’t know who Ethel was until a few years ago — when someone brought to my attention the disturbing and graphic side-by-side images she would often put up of me next to unflattering creatures and cartoon characters making constant comments about my weight, I was confused at what she was getting at. Then when I heard what she was saying behind closed doors from mutual friends and started inserting herself into my personal life I was definitely disturbed.”

Cain has spoken about his irritation at being compared to Del Rey across interviews and social media. On Tumblr, he once wrote, “i’m getting compared to that lady til the day i die, aren’t i.” In the i-D interview, he reiterated, “I love Lana and I love her music but there’s a hundred other things at play here… sometimes people arrive at Lana Del Rey and stop at Lana Del Rey. And yeah I called it lazy writing because it’s lazy for me and her. I think it’s kind of a detriment to the expansive work of two female artists to just reduce them to being similar to each other.”

Beyond the Instagram block and lyrical jabs, the feud folds into a larger conversation about influence, image, and authorship in a corner of pop where aesthetics are as scrutinized as the songs themselves. Cain has said that Born to Die was the first CD he bought, praising its dream of America before later rejecting its polish, stating, “I want something that’s raw and freaky and scary because to me, that’s what America is.” Del Rey has spent more than a decade crafting and reframing that dream, turning its iconography into her own mythology. It’s a shared frame, but the two occupy opposite sides of it, a tense dynamic now playing out in public, one snippet at a time.