Score: 4/5
The latest project from American singer-songwriter Hayden Silas Anhedönia, known professionally as Ethel Cain, is an unapologetic, challenging descent into the depths of lust, sexuality, perversion and self-realization.
Perverts is a stark deviation from Cain’s previous work on her debut album, Preacher’s Daughter, a harrowing American epic of the original character Ethel Cain and the events that lead to her tragic demise. Perverts operates separately from the album’s storyline in its own world.
Here, the lyrically dense dream-pop sound, which Cain established a reputation for, is replaced by lengthy drone tracks. The accessible, shimmering indie-pop melodies of songs like “American Teenager” and “Michelle Pfeiffer” are nowhere to be found. Instead, the track on Perverts demand patience from listeners as they build slowly over runtimes exceeding 10 minutes. For fans more acquainted with Cain’s notable pop-sounding — but nonetheless still brilliant — songs, Perverts may feel unwelcoming, but it is still a strong reflection of Cain’s willingness to make uncompromising, authentic art on her own terms.
Prior to the project’s release, Cain began sharing cryptic, eerie promotional material on her various social media platforms. These include unsettling videos on her YouTube channel with songs from the EP; a story of a man celebrating the one-year anniversary of his psychosexual, onanistic relationship with a power plant; and most notably, the repeated reference to the quote, “it’s happening to everybody.”
The thematics of Perverts live up to the title. Through carefully crafted ambient instrumentals and limited lyrical content, the project explores themes of sexuality, lust, perversion and shame. Like all of Cain’s work to date, the project’s themes are explored in relation to religious themes and divine connection.
The project begins with a staggering 12-minute title track, opening with a cover of the traditional Christian hymn, “Nearer, My God, to Thee,” with the sound warped and distorted like the hiss of a forgotten tape recording buried in the woods.
Cain ends the track with the line, “it’s happening to everybody.” Although intentionally open-ended, what “it” refers to is the revelation of desire. In a YouTube video, Cain introduced the concept of a “ring” as a way of understanding one’s proximity to divinity, transcendence or God, often achievable through music.
On Perverts, the ring illustrates a link between sexuality and a transcendental state. If you listen closely with headphones, ambient segments of these tracks circle from your left to right ear and craft a ring-like effect. It’s a small detail, but one that creates immense world-building.
Knowing this, “it” can be described as a revelatory state of mind, the moment when all the pieces seemingly click together and you surrender yourself to this realization. The narrative of Perverts makes this revelation a sexual one, but it applies broadly to all kinds of epiphanies we’re yet to experience.
Only three of the EP’s nine songs adopt a traditional, lyrical structure, but nonetheless trudge through ample drone and ambient aspects in between their verses. The second track and the project’s single, “Punish,” is a melancholic piece with beautiful production elements contrasted by unsettling subject matter.
The lyrics narrate a child predator who is shot by his victim’s father. Now living in exile from society, he engages in daily self-mutilation to simulate the bullet wound as an act of punishment. The subject matter is heinous and disturbing, but strengthens Perverts’ exploration of lust’s ability to control people, driving one to commit heinous actions of all kinds.
“Vacillator” is the EP’s second song with a distinct lyrical structure, which narrate a vacillator, someone tormented by their own indecision over a relationship. On one hand, they wish to fully surrender themselves physically to this person to satisfy their needs, but are plagued by their hesitancy. The first verse ends with the line, “You won’t lose me to thunder or lightning / But you could to crowded rooms.”
The vacillator expresses neurotic confidence over their ability to physically control their lover, but they know that crowded rooms full of many faces will dwarf their power over them. The following verse depicts their attempts to further seduce their lover, fixating on their possessive qualities.
The track ends with the narrator repeating the line, “If you love me, keep it to yourself.” This line acts as a double entendre, one of many scattered throughout Perverts to build on its established themes.
The vacillator struggles with indecision in the romantic realm. Out of shame and fear, they reject their partner’s advances while simultaneously wanting to keep their partner’s love for themselves, hidden from the glaring eyes of the world.
The EP’s longest cut at 15 minutes, “Pulldrone,” serves as a sonic climax to the album. Its placement towards the tail-end of the EP comes off as Cain recognizing that listeners who have made it this far are fully immersed and can handle whatever she throws their way.
After the narrator’s garbled spoken-word scripture, the track continues as a distorted harmonization of stunning organic strings, stretching and modulating in an entrancing manner. The two primary string lines intertwine in a sonic folie à deux, one always struggling for dominance over the other. The dance of sounds deliberately outlines a strangely erotic struggle for control between two forces. While the sheer length of the song could warrant more variety even for a drone track, the unapologetic length and atmospheric production are enough to justify these shortcomings for fully engaged listeners.
The EP wraps itself up on the arrestingly cold “Amber Waves,” one of the most accessible — by this EP’s standards — and devastating tracks. The narrator describes their lover, Amber, as they leave them, waving goodbye. The narrator speaks of numbing themselves from their emotional pain through sexual gratification and drugs. They attempt several times to reckon with their loneliness, using their addiction and hatred as comfort for their former lover’s departure. Cain ends the EP with a chilling delivery of the line, “I can’t feel anything,” a haunting, cataclysmic result of the narrator’s addiction, leaving them in a catatonic purgatory.
Perverts is equally challenging as it is rewarding, though the latter is dependent on the listener’s willingness to melt into the haunting soundscapes. For those not yet acquainted with drone and ambient music, it will likely be an uncomfortable, confusing listen not immune to criticism.
There is a strong point to be made with this release though. While Cain is a formidable lyricist and storyteller, as is visible on the magnificent Preacher’s Daughter, Perverts demonstrates her ability to manipulate soundscapes and nuances in production to tell stories, conjure mysteries and build worlds. Her voice is in the production here and it demands to be heard.