Perverts - Ethel Cain

By Enya Xiang

Ethel Cain’s sophomore album Perverts is a terror hellscape. Her voice is drowned by a symphony of industrial noises: buzzing, humming, hovering, vibrating, static. “I’d…like to thank the natural drone music that exists everywhere in this world,” she said in an Instagram post announcing the album, “I love you, sound, you have always been there for me.”

 Let’s start with the obvious: there’s not much singing in Perverts. Listening to the 90-minute album from start to finish is not for the faint of heart. The opening ‘Perverts’ begins with the hymn ‘Nearer, My God, to Thee’, which distorts into muffled voices and machinery. “I love you” repeats endlessly in ‘Housofpsychoticwomn’ with wavering frequencies and generator sounds, and disturbing confessions in ‘Pulldrone’ bare the soul of Ethel Cain who muses, “I am sure that Hell must be cold.”

 Through alienating noises and Judgment Day omens, Cain fashions together a southern gothic horror, a dark portrait of earthly sin and divine retribution, of pride and shame. Shedding the basic verse-chorus structure, she uses suspenseful, sluggish crescendos to portray grim motifs. A bleak study of human flaws and failures, Perverts asks you to commit to its all-consuming nature. 

 Ethel Cain, the alter ego of Hayden Anhedönia, struggled with the success of her 2022 debut Preacher’s Daughter, a concept album about religious abuse and family trauma, which became fuel for obsessive fan behaviour and tongue-in-cheek online discourse. In October, she criticized this “irony epidemic,” frustrated that her artistic intentions were reduced and ridiculed. “I feel like no matter what i make or what I do, it will always get turned into a fucking joke,” she wrote on Tumblr, worried that Perverts would receive a similar media response.

There’s no one laughing at Ethel Cain now. Perverts embraces the depravity and darkness of souls seeking vengeance and salvation. Dedicated to her storytelling, Cain wrote a complementary piece called The Consequence of Audience, in which the narrator journeys through the barren “Great Dark” towards a white dome on a hill, seeking an audience with God. Inspired by American Gothic writers such as Cormac McCarthy and Flannery O’Connor, she explains in an interview with HommeGirls, “I want to capture the eloquence and the poetry of that kind of bygone age of the late 1800s, into the early 1900s.”

The few tracks that feature Ethel Cain’s phantom voice are severe and brutal. “Only God would believe that I was an angel,” she whispers in slow-burning ‘Punish’, “but they made me leave.” In ‘Vacillator’, a bare drum beats painfully slow as Cain echoes, “If you love me, keep it to yourself.” In ‘Amber Waves’, a sedative addict watches a lover leave. While a lonely guitar plays, the line “I can’t feel anything” ends the album.

Emerging from the realm of Perverts feels like an escape from death. I only wish there was more of Cain’s striking voice. Musicians and artists are no strangers to straining and distorting voices to create ugly and authoritative sounds. However, Ethel Cain has certainly won the gravitas she has fought hard to reclaim.