Warning: this article discusses themes of suicide, sex, and sexual violence.
Hayden Silas Anhedönia, better known by her stage name Ethel Cain, has made quite an imprint on the music scene since her 2022 album Preacher's Daughter took critics by storm with its twisted, Southern Gothic-inspired story and sound. An intense exploration of family trauma and sexual violence, partially inspired by Anhedönia's own youth spent as the child of a deacon, Preacher's Daughter was a mishmash of genres that culminated in an incredibly unique sonic landscape, which critics ate up readily.
Cain's latest release is Perverts, which, sonically, seems to be reactionary to Preacher's Daughter. While only nine tracks long, Perverts has a runtime of nearly an hour and a half; notably absent are any of the four- and five-minute, relatively easily digestible or pop-adjacent songs from the previous album, like the single "American Teenager." With this release, Cain seems to be moving away from anything that would draw comparisons with fellow LGBTQ+ pop icon Chappell Roan, choosing to revel in experimental, inaccessible sonic landscapes.
Perverts seems completely disconnected from the concept of time, as much a languid exploration of Cain's relationship with her Southern Baptist upbringing as it is an exploration of drone music that incorporates the DNA of albums like Godspeed You! Black Emperor's F#A#∞, or perhaps an analog descendant of DJ Shadow's Preemptive Strike. The sonic base texture of Perverts is built off of field recordings of the water rushing past Three Sisters Island in New York, next to Niagara Falls, which Cain recorded herself (via @mothercain on Tumblr).
While fans who found Ethel Cain through memorable pop songs like "American Teenager" may be turned off by Perverts and its ethereal confidence, the record clearly exhibits the kind of sound that Cain has said she wants to explore more with her music. Stereogum reports that Cain insists Perverts is not an album, despite the 90-minute runtime, although she hasn't yet suggested an alternative description of the release. Regardless of what category Perverts eventually gets put into, however, no label will accurately describe the existentially challenging aural experience of listening to this masterful, droning composition.
Ethel Cain – Perverts Track List
Track
Title
Length
1
"Perverts"
12:04
2
"Punish"
6:40
3
"Housofpsychoticwomn"
13:35
4
"Vacillator"
7:44
5
"Onanist"
6:24
6
"Pulldrone"
15:14
7
"Etienne"
8:43
8
"Thatorchia"
7:24
9
"Amber Waves"
11:32
9
Thatorchia
Track 8 Of 9
Although lyric-less, "Thatorchia" is laden with vocals, with Cain's wordless lamenting – overdubbed and harmonizing with herself as if through an endless catacomb of sewer culverts – providing an ebb and flow over the static and drone that guides the track to the sudden attack of overdriven guitar and bass at just past the five-minute mark. It's a shameful invocation of an unnamed need, building to the album's final climax, but never quite reaching it.
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Befitting the nature of an aborted climax, the song's name seems to be a portmanteau of "thanatos," the Greek word for "death" (or the name of the god of death) and "orchia," Greek for "testicle." Given Perverts and its general exploration of the themes of shame and divine wrath towards the sin of masturbation, and Cain's own gender modality, it seems clear that "Thatorchia" is a frustrated statement of how shame can equate to castration.
8
Etienne
Track 7 Of 9
Gently repetitive, with a simple guitar-and-piano chord progression that harkens all the way back to earlier tracks "Punish" and "Onanist," "Etienne" is well-placed on the album as a gentle relief after the punishing assault of "Pulldrone." The last 40 seconds have the only vocals, a heavily modulated recording of an old sermon from the 1970s or 80s that Cain said on her Tumblr that she bought in 2024 and sampled some of for Perverts.
The speech, although difficult to parse due to the age of the original recording and the modulation, is oddly inspiring when compared to Perverts' other, more self-destructive and self-loathing lyrics, with an anecdote about someone trying to give himself a heart attack by running too hard, only to find that running made him feel less suicidal.
7
Housofpsychoticwomn
Track 3 Of 9
The title of this track was originally a filler, taken from the name of a book of the same title by horror film scholar Kier-La Janisse that Cain was reading during recordings; when she chose "Housofpsychoticwomn" for Perverts, Cain decided changing the working title "felt wrong" and kept it (via @mothercain on Tumblr). Janisse's book, House of Psychotic Women, is subtitled "An Autobiographical Topography of Female Neurosis in Horror and Exploitation Films," and that feels appropriate for the song's raw, confessional nature.
The simple, repeated refrain of "I love you," used at the beginning of "Housofpsychoticwomn" over a hypnotic, oscillating drone, underscores the track's main vocals, which are a monologue of self-loathing and grief, of an inarticulable need for affection, be it from God or mortal, to be returned. "Do you think you know how to give up?" Cain asks, "Do you think you understand what it means to be loved? You don't, and you never will."
The track ends with the narrator seeming to shift, as the modulation of the vocals changes with the final lines of the monologue: "When you were young, you said you wished that someone loved you. I do. I do. I do. I do."Perhaps this is God's response to that need for love; regardless, the drone begins to pulse unsettlingly as it is underdubbed with echoing vocal fry as the endless refrain of "I love you" returns, now an ominous promise of unwanted attention.
6
Pulldrone
Track 6 Of 9
Perverts' longest track is also its most challenging and dense, composed of an almost robotic, dissociated monologue enumerating a list of sins and self-destructive thoughts of agony and shame in the face of attempting to connect to a sense of divine euphoria. Cain has gone into great detail about her theory of "The Ring, the Great Dark, and Proximity to God" on her YouTube channel, and "Pulldrone" serves as a thorough exploration of the process of attempting to push beyond human discomfort in order to find that divine euphoria.
The eighth pillar of "Pulldrone," Resentment, contains the line "Let me tell you how much I've come to hate you since I began to live." This is a quote from Harlan Ellison's short story I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream, said by AM, a malevolent supercomputer built to save humanity from World War III but which decided instead to wipe out the human race, save for five people it keeps alive in order to torture endlessly.
If music exists as an expression of human subconscious experience, "Pulldrone" and its 12-minute-long hurdy-gurdy drone (via @mothercain on Tumblr) represents the yawning pits of shame within us all. Beneath the twelve pillars Cain details, the drone continues and builds, and carries on almost eternally after the twelfth pillar, Desolation. While physically challenging to listen to, there is artistry in and among the unending drone, tiny modulations and changes that reflect the tense inner landscape of a mind torn between self-recrimination and the pursuit of pleasure.
5
Amber Waves
Track 9 Of 9
First teased on Cain's Instagram alongside a clip from the surrealist 1990 film The Reflecting Skin, "Amber Waves" is both a story of "the personification of love cast aside to get high" (via @mothercain on Tumblr) and a reflection on the "amber waves of grain" from the 1895 American anthem "America the Beautiful." If Perverts is a story of someone challenging herself to find pleasure, despite a culture and an inner monologue of shame, then "Amber Waves" is the tragic climax of that story, as she instead chooses addiction and self-delusion, which drive her first to catatonia and then numbness.
Cain's real surname – Anhedönia – is a stylization of "anhedonia," the psychological term for being unable to experience or be motivated to pursue pleasure. Clearly, Perverts' narrative through-line embodies a struggle with anhedonic and catatonic impulses, and that culminates in "Amber Waves" and its final chorus:
Is it not fun to feel many other ways?
What you do is nothing to me
Is it not fun in the catatonia?
Maybe it's true, you were nothing to me
4
Onanist
Track 5 Of 9
An onanist is someone who regularly performs coitus interruptus or, more specifically, a chronic masturbator – someone damned by the narrative of the opening song "Perverts." Onanism derives its name from Onan, a figure from the Torah (Genesis 38) who refused to fulfill his duty, as demanded by law, to impregnate his late brother's widow, and instead "spilled his seed on the ground." This angered God, who slew Onan and condemned him to Hell.
Biblical scholars are mixed on how much this parable affected the development of Jewish proscriptions around masturbation. However, it's clear from centuries of Christian scholarship that the idea of "spilling seed" was considered a major sin; the notorious French theologian John Calvin, as well as John Wesley (who founded Methodism), both described the act as "monstrous" and said it "destroyed the souls of the individuals who practice it."
Cain's Baptist faith informs much of "Onanist" the song, which opens with simple, atonal piano that sets up a vast, empty space before the lyrics, which parallel the beginning verse of Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy, enter as a siren song over an increasingly static-laden drone. "But there, before the grace of God go I," she sings, "I want to know love, I want to know what it feels like"; after a pronounced break, the repetitive recitation of "it feels good" builds to something approaching an emotional climax, yet never quite reaching it – intimate yet unfulfilled, a true musical coitus interruptus.
3
Vacillator
Track 4 Of 9
The percussion that opens "Vacillator" seems almost like the ghost of a drum kit, slowly coming to life in order to push back the droning insistence of affection from the track before it. Befitting its title, "Vacillator" is the point at which the narrative of Perverts turns back in on itself, juxtaposing the continued desire for intimacy with an acknowledgment that the narrator's yearning may not be strong enough to eclipse her fear.
"If you want, you can bite me and I won't move," the first verse says seductively. "Do you like that, baby? I can make you cum twenty times today," promises the second. And yet the song finishes once again with epizeuxis (the rhetorical device of repeating the same word or phrase for emphasis), imploring "If you love me, keep it to yourself." Clearly, whatever affection the narrator began to feel at the end of "Housofpsychoticwomn" is being met with vacillation, as the idea of accepting that affection only leads to more shame.
2
Perverts
Track 1 Of 9
Perverts' eponymous opening track begins with a lo-fi recording of Cain singing the hymn "Nearer, My God, To Thee," which splits into an unsettling harmony before shutting off with a definitive tape-deck click, at which point the album's drone begins. Cain discussed the inclusion of the old hymn, which she has fond memories of from her Southern Baptist youth, in a Tumblr post:
From there, "Perverts" almost immediately inverts itself; what sense of joy and fondness may have been found in Cain's recitation of the old hymn is shoved away by the modulated insistence that "Heaven has forsaken the masturbator," a refrain that continues for the remainder of the track. "No one you know is a good person," the voice insists as the drone intensifies, "Fast, reckless driving often leads to slow, sad music." Considering how the entirety of Perverts is slow, sad music, it leaves the listener wondering how reckless Cain's driving habits must be.
1
Punish
Track 2 Of 9
As the second-shortest and most traditionally melodic (relatively speaking) song on Perverts, "Punish" was released as the album's lead single in November 2024, and since then has nearly eclipsed four million streams on Spotify alone. Its six-and-a-half-minute runtime builds from sparse noise and piano to intensely distorted, droning guitars, yet the breadth of sounds are held together by the mournful chorus: "I am punished by love."
Perverts is redolent with expressions of shame at indulging in love or sexual pleasure. "Punish"'s second verse takes this a step further, beyond the Evangelical Christian idea that sexual pleasure is a sin, by drawing a parallel between the narrator and true divinity; "Only God knows, only God would believe that I was an angel, but they made me leave." The demon Asmodeus appears in Jewish, Christian, and Islamic lore, and in many of those sources is specifically labeled as a demon of lust; Cain has Asmodeus' name in Hebrew (אַשְמְדּאָי or Ashmedai) tattooed across her forehead.
Custom image by Zahra Huselid
English (US) ·