Just a week into 2025, Ethel Cain has released a unique and challenging album.
“Perverts,” the second studio release by the gloomy Americana artist Hayden Anhedönia, who performs as Ethel Cain, deploys a vast array of elements. Post-industrial noise, glacial tempos, layered reverb and ritualistic incantations through darkly angelic vocals combine in a jarring exploration of self-gratification and self-loathing.
The artist’s first full-length release, 2022’s “Preacher’s Daughter,” blended folk, goth and ambient elements. Cain’s ethereal vocals spun a story of violence, trauma, and Southern-Baptist confession. “Perverts” enters as the second installment of a planned trilogy and tells a postmodern horror story through its formidable sound. Where “Preacher’s Daughter” tiptoed into brutalist musical margins, “Perverts” is aggressively experimental, featuring poetry-slam style exposition, long periods of droning and empty air.
Cain produces and plays a variety of instruments on “Perverts,” including the uncommon, bowed-stringed hurdy gurdy. Multi-instrumentalists Matthew Tomasi of the band 9million, who also collaborated on “Preacher’s Daughter,” and the lo-fi artist Angel Diaz, both make limited but impactful contributions to a soundscape that evokes intense isolation.
Finding influence in ambient music and the sub-genre slowcore, much of “Perverts” can sound unstructured the first time through. A deeper listen through its 90-minute run time reveals meticulous composition, with the musical elements purposefully slowed and distorted. In sound as in lyrics, the listener is left to find pattern and meaning in its sparseness.
The title track opens the album and sets the table for the journey within. It begins with a warbly recording of “Nearer, My God, to Thee,” the hymn that the Titanic band played as the ship sank to its doom in James Cameron’s 1997 film. Nearly 40 seconds of dead air follow, before Cain speaks and repeats the line, “heaven has forsaken the masturbator.” Reverberations intensify throughout.
The metallic “Punish,” which follows, is one of the more accessible songs. A simple 4-chord piano progression runs the duration. Cain delivers the lyrics in ghostly, lullaby vocals. As she sings “I am punished by love,” a grinding electric guitar engulfs the piano and vocals.
In Cain’s universe, pleasure always ends in pain. Like in “Vacillator,” where she sings: “If you love me / keep it to yourself.”
Cain has made an interesting choice in presenting such a difficult and unexpected sophomore release. “Preacher’s Daughter” drew wide critical acclaim — at least partially due to its single anti-pop hit, “American Teenager” — and Cain expanded her fanbase by touring with beloved acts like the indie artist Mitski and the Grammy Award-winning boygenius. “Perverts” is bound to alienate some of her audience, but as an artistic statement of uncompromising experimentation, its legacy may be to expand ideas of musical boundaries.
