Ethel Cain Is Only Getting Darker
The gothic doomsayer returns with a droning seance inspired by *checks notes* an infamous murdered pedophile.
In an effort to maintain mystique and interpretive distance, a lot of musicians are hesitant to explain exactly what their songs are, you know, about. Hayden Anhedönia, who makes music as Ethel Cain, does not have that inclination. On the topic of her haunted new track “Punish,” she wrote that it is about “a pedophile who was shot by the child’s father and now lives in exile where he physically maims himself to simulate the bullet wound in order to punish himself.” So that settles that! (The idea is based on a true story from the ’80s.) To be fair, she added, “The song can be whatever you want it to be.” But her description is so specific—and harrowing—that it reads like a dare to all those songwriters who are still hung up on regrettable exes and vague trauma, bound by their own lived experience: Stop playing it safe.
There are very few current artists who have the imagination and the nerve to go near such pitch-black subject matter—and even fewer, if any, who also have more than 3 million listeners on Spotify and regularly play to thousands of obsessive fans live. As Ethel Cain has gathered her sizable cult, her music has only gotten stranger and slower and more esoteric: The eerie moan of a playground swing runs throughout “Punish,” which moves at the pace of a slug sliming down the hood of a creepy white van.
Would it be nice if she dabbled in pop melodies again, like on “Crush” and “American Teenager”? I guess. She is good at that. But there are plenty of pop artists out there with sticky top lines, desperate for their 15 seconds of TikTok fame. On the other hand, there is only one notable musician I know of who’s filming 72-minute YouTube vlogs about their extensive history with the paranormal, as Anhedönia did a few weeks ago. At this point, she makes singers like Lana Del Rey and Florence Welch, to whom she has frequently been compared, sound like Kidz Bop. Instead, she is seriously challenging ambient-folk sorceress Grouper in the category of Music You Hear When You Die, and There Is No Heaven or Hell, and You’re Just Floating in Blackness for Eternity.
“Punish” is the first track released from her forthcoming 90-minute project Perverts, which, if recent live previews are any indication, will be an exercise in painstaking drone; at nearly seven minutes, it is the second shortest song on the entire record. Even though “Punish” is ostensibly told through the perspective of a child abuser, the song is not trying to be some kind of edgelord provocation. Anhedönia, who grew up in the Southern Baptist Church, uses the premise to explore the outermost extremes of shame, love, and forgiveness. “Shame is sharp, and my skin gives so easy,” she sings in a deliberate cadence, as if her voice itself were floating in limbo. “Only God knows, only God would believe/That I was an angel, but they made me leave.” At that, the grungiest guitar since In Utero descends upon the sparse track, like the blood gushing through the elevator in The Shining. As she repeats “I am punished by love” over this flow of distortion, the impact is as discomfiting as it is mesmerizing. This is the Ethel Cain effect: The darker it gets, the more you want—need—to follow her candlelit path.
