Ethel Cain
Perverts
Daughters of Cain/AWAL
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When Donald Trump won the election in November, Ethel Cain made headlines for her reaction. “If you voted for Trump, I hope that peace never finds you. Instead, I hope clarity strikes you someday like a clap of lightning and you have to live the rest of your life with the knowledge and guilt of what you’ve done and who you are as a person,” she said. She managed to capture the righteous, shaking rage that I—and no doubt so many others—felt for those who had voted for a flagrant insurrectionist and adjudicated rapist. But, for me at least, her statement also contained a more difficult emotion—a bleak, black hopelessness. It’s therefore fitting that, whether planned as a Trump response or not, Ethel Cain’s new project Perverts deals with, as its overarching concept, walking into a deep, dark wood.
Ethel Cain, the alter ego of the artist Hayden Silas Anhedönia, might not have even made headlines for her reaction to Trump’s win had she not built her debut album Preacher’s Daughter (2022), a Southern Gothic opus, on the foundation of having lived in what is now Trump country. Growing up Southern Baptist in the small town of Perry, Florida, Anhedönia’s father was a deacon and her mother a proud member of the church choir. As a teen, she came out as trans. “We were a house divided,” Anhedönia told W magazine in 2022. “It was me versus my whole town.” Eventually, her parents’ love for her won out, but growing up “different” in a place of militant conformity and oppressive “morality” had made its indelible, traumatic imprint. Still, when she eventually left home, Anhedönia chose to stay in the South, settling in Alabama.
Her art no doubt offered catharsis, but Preacher’s Daughter’s release into the world, and its subsequent rabid fanfare, was fraught for a young woman who was accustomed to spending a lot of time making music alone in her bedroom in a sleepy Southern town. “Going from absolutely nobody to getting a billboard in Times Square, it’s been a lot to process in the past two years,” she told W. “I made this record so specifically to my tastes—and right at the end, I made some changes based on my own anxieties about: Is it gonna get good reviews? Is it gonna do well in the press? Are people gonna like it? Are they gonna stream it? Moving forward, I’m just putting my phone down. I don’t wanna think of myself as an artist that is any bigger than I was when I started making music.”
Then, this past October, Anhedönia made headlines again for a now-deleted Tumblr post, whereby she lamented the current “irony epidemic.” “I feel like no matter what I make or what I do, it will always get turned into a fucking joke. It's genuinely so embarrassing. I hate feeling like I’m constantly complaining, but I’m honest to god so turned off by so much of the way people engage with the shit I do and with most things in general.”
It's not difficult to trace where she might be coming from. Although Preacher’s Daughter is an expansive epic—telling the nuanced story of a trans woman (Ethel Cain) who falls in love with an abusive man, turns to drugs and sex work, and is eventually killed by her lover and stuffed in a freezer to later be cannibalized—it’s a sonically beautiful record, so it’s possible to ignore the storyline in favor of its ethereal pop moments, like the shimmering, Swiftian “American Teenager.” Or, if you are aware that there’s a narrative but aren’t prone to concentration, you could also ignore the nuances of the storyline and focus solely on its sensational elements as though it were an episode of Crime Junkie.
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However, all said and done, Anhedönia is a serious artist with a refined and deeply honed aesthetic beyond her 26 years, and so it’s understandable why she may have gotten fed up with vapid fans who think she’s just a goth Taylor Swift or who snicker over the cannibalism.
Her latest record Perverts, which Anhedönia refuses to even call an album (she refers to it as a “body of work,” a “project,” and even more curiously as an “EP”) is clearly a rebuke—maybe even a robust fuck you—to those types of fans. But it’s also a piece of very focused and deliberately crafted art, taking some of the most interesting and difficult elements of Preacher’s Daughter, stripping them down to their essence, and creating something unignorably terrifying. Whereas Preacher’s Daughter tells a winding narrative that might allow one to get waylaid or distracted, Perverts tells its story through 90 minutes of unrelenting dark atmosphere and ambience.
In another nod to making music solely to please herself, Perverts is accompanied by a text titled “The Consequence of Audience,” in which Anhedönia writes of losing herself in a wood. “As I went there through the long, long wood, I felt no-thing and I was no-thing and I was at ease,” she writes. “The grey ash trees and their mottled plumage were as one with each other, curving and branching to form a ceiling overhead.” But then suddenly the terrain changes, and she is “thrust upon the rocky expanse that was the Great Dark.” Here, she is no longer alone and experiences others’ judgement and alienation, which has become a painful negative feedback loop in her life: “I can-not contain the ache for sensation, just as I could not contain the grief as I fell, nor the agony as I crawled my way back to this rocky countryside, and lo! I am on my way there again now.”
The project opens with the titular track “Perverts,” which begins with an old-timey lo-fi recording of the 19th century hymn “Nearer, My God, to Thee,” which tells the biblical story of Jacob’s Ladder. The hymn gives way to distorted spoken word, and Anhedönia intones over pulsing, sinister synths, “Heaven has forsaken the masturbator / No one you know is a good person / Fast, reckless driving often leads to slow, sad music.” It’s reminiscent of the buzzing flies and chilling voice of the demon on “Ptolemaea,” the track on Preacher’s Daughter where the narrative shakes loose and the horror becomes abject. In fact, much of Perverts seems to reference either “Ptolemaea” or the song that immediately follows, the ghostly, gauzy, rumbling “August Underground.” In addition, pieces of “A House In Nebraska”—its vast spaciousness and its hypnotizing drone—are also deconstructed and repurposed on Perverts. With these seemingly few elements, Anhedonia constructs a landscape that is entirely new, utterly dark, and frighteningly expansive.
“Punish,” the project’s first single released back in November, begins with what sounds like the creak and groan of rusty machinery, and Anhedönia sings with signature ethereality over a lo-fi piano loop. It’s one of the record’s few traditional-sounding tracks and, as Anhedönia explained on her Tumblr, the song was written to fit a now-abandoned concept inspired by Donald Ray Pollock’s novel Knockemstiff, a tale about a town full of deviants. “The OG concept for perverts was a character study about different ‘perverts,’ inspired by reading Knockemstiff—a sex addict, a pedophile, an arsonist, a sedative addict, etc.,” Anhedönia wrote. “The project is completely different now, but ‘Punish’ and ‘Amber Waves’ are the only surviving demos from it so they’re still about that.” “Punish,” Anhedönia asserts, is about a pedophile who lives in exile after being shot and maimed by the child’s father, though, she says, “The song can be whatever you want it to be.” (The lyrics themselves are cryptic, and so I personally prefer to not think about a pedophile when I hear this gorgeous song.)
Next up, “Housofpsychoticwomn,” named after a book on neurotic horror-movie heroines, makes use of the repeated, muffled phrase “I love you” over a metronome to create an immediate sense of discomfort and dis-ease. It then dissolves into the cyclical spinning of a top, or a washing machine, in a way that replicates a swarm of insects. It’s a deeply uncomfortable track that frightens by way of Hitchcockian subtlety and suggestion rather than outright horror.
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“Vascillator,” featuring languid drumming by frequent Ethel Cain collaborator Matt Tomasi, is a slow-burn with traditional song structure and vocals. In the video, which just dropped this Thursday, Anhedönia wears binding lingerie and dances a teasing writhe on a dark slab of table under a glaring florescent light. She whips her hair repeatedly, and the dance is both performative and private, sensual and unsettling. “I could make you cum twenty times a day,” she sings. “Close the door, let me in.” Finally, though, the vacillation ends with resolve: “If you love me, keep it to yourself,” she repeats over and over, until she suddenly disappears from the room, only for her image to reappear in closeup—and in ghostly shudder—over the bare table and the stark fluorescent light.
On the next track, “Onanist,” a fancy synonym for masturbator, we’re back in the long, long wood amidst what sounds like a raging windstorm. This time, the repeated phrase is “It feels good,” and it’s not wholly unsettling. It does feel good, if not a little weird. But then this hard-earned warmth and softness gives way to “Pulldrone,” full of spoken word against yawning negative space, and the discomfort returns. There’s a sense of fighting against hypnosis, and a magnetic pull in outer space. Then comes a continuous buzzing drone. It’s near headache-inducing and the most difficult experience on the record, though it still feels somehow strategic and necessary.
“Etienne” features slightly dueling acoustic guitar and introspective piano against a subtle background of low buzzing drone. The human touch on the instruments is welcome after the empty alien shriek of “Pulldrone,” but then “Thatorchia” takes us right back to pulsing pink noise that again reads as inhuman and otherworldly.
The project ends on “Amber Waves,” which according to Anhedönia, is about “love cast aside to get high.” This is likely the profile of “the sedative addict” that Anhedönia mentioned in the cast of characters inspired by the novel Knockemstiff. The song offers us more rushing winds and the lush, angelic vocals for which Anhedönia is so well-known. She’s joined by Vyva Melinkolya’s Angel Diaz on electric piano and lap steel, as well as Madeline Johnston of Midwife on guitar. The song, velvety and beautifully layered, ends with the addict singing, “Watching love of mine leave / But I’ll be alright / Me and my amber waves / I’ll be alright, I’ll be alright, I’ll be alright.”
Perverts is a project full of push/pull, enveloping warmth and chafing discomfort. It offers an intimate glimpse into Anhedönia’s artistry and process, while at other points keeping the listener at arm’s length through the use of alienating noise and stark negative space. It’s so experimental and so out of left field that it will no doubt serve as a tabula rasa for when Anhedönia chooses to return with a more traditional record. After the oppressive success and heavy artistic weight of Preacher’s Daughter, this industrial anti-album was exactly what needed to be done.
Notable Tracks: “Amber Waves” | “Punisher” | “Vacillator”
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