Understanding Ethel Cain's "Perverts"
Though most of her work comes from the strange and novel, Ethel Cain’s most recent release begins in a familiar place. Perverts’ titular opening track begins with Cain performing 19th century Christian hymn “Nearer My God to Thee,” her voice warped and multiplied to replicate the sermon recordings she grew up listening to. The song is a Sunday morning staple; its lyrics begging for the revelatory spiritual connection that JD Salinger’s Franny and Zooey refers to as “an entirely new conception of what everything’s about.” The intro's remaining eleven minutes are something of a post-nut hellscape, built from brown noise punctuated with whispering voices and tolling synths. While “Perverts” is the album’s simplest track sonically and structurally, it’s also the perfect palette-prepper for the project’s remaining hour and seventeen minutes.
Perverts is only the sophomore album released by Ethel Cain (the stage persona of songwriter, producer, and multi-instrumentalist Hayden Anhedönia) but she has a deceptively dense backlog. Though her debut Preacher’s Daughter was far from limited in its influences—the concept album pulls from folk, slowcore, 2000s pop and a myriad of other genres—Perverts’ experimental elements may, at first glance, appear unprecedented in her discography. Catapulted into the mainstream by TikTok’s adoption of lead single “American Teenager,” Preacher’s Daughter earned Cain both a cult following of young women and a memeified reverberation of the album cycle’s Southern gothic aesthetics. The artist has been accused of crafting Perverts in an attempt to drive both reactions away, with a paragraph posted to her Tumblr expressing frustration at the irony her work had been met with online being cited as proof. Cain refuted this claim on the same Tumblr, stating that the album’s motivations were simple: “I just really like drone music and wanted to make some.” Though this affinity has rarely been explored before as Ethel Cain, it serves as a major influence for Anhedönia’s ambient work as Ashmada, and Perverts’ use of both drone and storytelling elements feels like a natural evolution of her sprawling artistic interests. Thematic parallels also connect the two albums, and as far back as 2019’s Carpet Bed EP, Cain’s work has explored the forms of communion and corruption created in the name of love.
Perverts’ most explicitly narrative tracks (including lead single “Punish” and deviant almost-singalong “Vacillator”) meditate on the thrill and shame of their narrator’s transgressions. Littered with abusers, addicts and onanists, the project at times feels grimy with the price and pleasure of its protagonist’s perversions. Between these two tracks “Housofpsychoticwomn” continues the deconstructed ambiance of “Perverts,” its twenty-six variations of the phrase “I love you” exemplifying an experimental playfulness often hidden by the project’s macabre tone.
The album’s longest track is “Pulldrone,” which clocks in at over fifteen minutes. In the eleven, it takes the saw-like buzz of Cain’s hurdy gurdy to fizzle into the groans of a window-bound fly, I think again of Franny and Zooey, or, more specifically, its retelling of the 19th-century religious novel The Way of the Pilgrim. The text uses the life of a Russian traveler to theologically expand on “what it means in the bible when it says you’re supposed to pray without ceasing,” a practice which at its beginning involves the literal, vocal recitation of the Lord’s Prayer. “Nobody asks you to believe a single thing when you first start out,” Franny gleefully tells her disinterested boyfriend, “all you have to have in the beginning is quality.” In many ways, Perverts and the eternal prayer ask for the same things (dedication, constant recommitment of attention) and offer the same rewards (a promise of spiritual climax). In The Way of the Pilgrim, this sudden celestial unity is as physical as the air Cain uses to vibrate your eardrums; “something happens, and the words get synchronized with the person’s heartbeats, and then you’re actually praying without ceasing.”
Though the album’s first half is dedicated to the shame and self-destruction of its protagonists, it’s also careful to point out that each of their actions are motivated by the desire for a higher spectrum of experience, and if there is a journey being depicted on Perverts, it’s one towards transcendence. On “Etienne” this comes in the form of Cain’s piano, which sticks to the air like a warm, primordial nirvana. “Thatorichia” substitutes this solace with awe, its synths and vocal melodies building to hundred-eyed, be-not-afraid extremities. Equal parts terrifying and beautiful, these tracks offer parallel recreations of what happens when the eternal prayer is successful; when “something happens in the nonphysical part of the heart—where Hindus say that Atman resides, if you ever took any Religion—and you see God.”
Much of the project’s marketing and lyrics play with the concept of a simulacrum, which is a symbol that has been altered to the point that it no longer depicts reality but is pervasive enough to replace what it was intended to represent, creating what sociologist Jean Baudrillard called “a copy without an original.” It’s left characteristically vague what symbol Cain is alluding to here, whether it’s a humanity made in the image of a God they’ve been irrevocably separated from, a blue-eyed Jesus divorced from theology and stapled to agenda, or a soundscape crafted to approximate the divine.
This soundscape relies heavily on the use of field recording. In a message posted to Cain’s social media upon the album’s release, she takes a moment to thank “the natural drone music that exists everywhere in this world, in transformer boxes and powerlines on the side of the highway, in the radio static of an empty AM frequency, in the fan of my computer as my Ableton project files overloaded the CPU, and in the distant roar of the interstate on the other side of my favorite field.” This guerilla instrumentation makes Perverts’ recreation of God a near literal one, built from a collection of divine traces strewn across creation and constructed in the desperate hope they’ll reassemble into something roughly His shape.
The album’s final track, “Amber Waves,” feels like the comedown from a high. For perhaps the first time on the entire album Cain’s vocals are on full display, depicting a bittersweet mix of defeat and surrender. The song is soft, slow, and tragically gorgeous. After almost ninety minutes pursuing the fringes of physical and spiritual euphoria, Perverts ends not with a bang, but with the resigned murmur of “I can’t feel anything.”
Salinger, J.D. 1919-2010. Franny and Zooey. [1st ed.] Boston, Little, Brown, 1961.
