Released October 29, 2025 via YEAR0001 as the seventh track on Anna von Hausswolff’s ICONOCLASTS, “Aging Young Women” marks the first collaboration between the Swedish experimental musician and American alt-artist Ethel Cain.
The pairing feels inevitable: both artists specialise in gothic, cathedral-sized soundscapes that make you feel small and significant at once.
The track builds like a slow-motion surrender. Hausswolff’s organ work doesn’t just accompany the vocals. It becomes a third voice, droning and devotional, turning what could be a straightforward lament about aging into something almost liturgical.
When Cain enters, her delivery adds a Southern Gothic weight that grounds Hausswolff’s ethereal approach.
Together, they examine fear of aging and disappearing dreams with the kind of resigned beauty on Lana Del Rey’s “Young and Beautiful”, but stripped of glamour, leaving only the ache.
“We’re getting older by the hour / Every year we have more fear.”
That line, echoed through refrains and swelling organ progressions, captures the song’s stillness and dread.
Strings layer beneath piano until the organs arrive like a congregation joining mid-prayer. It’s patient music, refusing to rush toward catharsis.
In the press release, Hausswolff explained, “Aging Young Women’ is about when the passing of time becomes a negative notion due to unfulfilled dreams and a feeling that a tainted situation is impossible to change to the contrary.”
In some way the track captures something specific about millennial and Gen Z anxiety: the compression of youth, the accelerated timeline of when life “should” happen, the creeping panic that time is running faster now.
What makes “Aging Young Women” palpable is its refusal or simply lack of comfort. The repetition of fears about futures and families disappearing doesn’t resolve; it accumulates.
Hausswolff and Ethel Cain don’t try to fix anything. They just hold space for the dread, letting it echo through those cavernous arrangements until you’re sitting in it with them.
ICONOCLASTS continues Hausswolff’s exploration of challenging conventional structures, and this collaboration proves she’s found a kindred spirit in Cain’s willingness to make discomfort beautiful.
“Aging Young Women” by Anna von Hausswolff and Ethel Cain is a meeting of two worlds that don’t soften each other; they magnify the darkness until it feels holy.
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