Ethel Cain Is Not Here for Your Amusement

Following the runaway success of her 2022 debut album Preacher’s Daughter, Ethel Cain seemed poised to scale the indie-rock ladder. She opened for Florence and the Machine, Caroline Polachek, and Boygenius. She played Coachella and Central Park. She built a loyal social media following that was equally enamored with her hot takes about The Legend of Zelda franchise, her eerie home videos of rural America, and her Miu Miu runway moments. She even appeared on Forbes’ 30 Under 30 music list alongside mainstream pop upstarts Gracie Abrams and Reneé Rapp. But just because Ethel Cain, aka Hayden Anhedönia, could be very famous, it didn’t mean she wanted to be very famous.

Anhedönia bristled at her newfound notoriety. When Barack Obama placed her song “American Teenager” on one of his annual playlists, she jabbed back, “Did not have a former president including my anti-war, anti-patriotism fake pop song on his end of year list on my 2022 bingo.” She’s claimed to have turned down collaborations with big, unnamed stars. And she’s fed up with the unserious way her ballooning cult treats her and her art. “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 It’s so beyond frustrating,” she wrote last year on the relatively barren and outdated social media platform Tumblr. “I’m so stressed out already anticipating the stupid shit I’m gonna have to see about perverts lol.”

Perverts is Ethel Cain’s new album. If you thought she would build out the mythology of Preacher’s Daughter or stunt with another crossover hit like “American Teenager,” you’d be mistaken. Most of the songs on Perverts confidently pass the 10-minute mark, and the project as a whole is over an hour and a half long. Baleful piano, crackling static, echoing croaks, and swirling witch-house ambience abound. Instead of sparkling hooks, Ethel Cain deploys heavily distorted whispers like demonic ASMR. Only a few songs contain distinguishable lyrics. In their place are strands of old hymnals and fragmentary field recordings threaded across the album like ghostly signals beamed in from a 19th-century seance. The result is startlingly opaque. “I miss when I had like 20 fans who actually had something interesting to say in response to what I was making,” she wrote in that same Tumblr missive, and it’s easy to read Perverts as a means to winnow her following.

For all its unapproachability, Perverts has a trance-like power. Soft whispers, cooing vocals, gently strummed guitar, rolling toms, and reverb-heavy cymbals all build songs like “Vacillator” into haunting lullabies for the end times. “I can make you come 20 times a day,” she sings on the song, mournfully. “If you love me, keep it to yourself.”

With Perverts, Anhedönia condemns us to a grating, disorienting, angry piece of art crafted by a trans woman in an increasingly anti-trans nation. Visibility, she seems to say, comes with its own trap doors. Perhaps that’s part of why this record is so impenetrable: Better to keep the hazy mist up rather than deliver a signed confession to those who want to see you dead. 

The album is not a memoir. Anhedönia and her fictions subtly subvert audience expectations. She has always marketed herself as someone capable of expansive worldbuilding, but the story she fashions on Perverts leads us into a manor full of winding hallways where guilt is personified through withered hands and old mirrors.

There’s pain underneath these compositions, especially on “Punish,” which was inspired by the true story of a pedophile who was shot and killed by their victim’s father. “I am punished by love,” she lilts over and over as the song swells to its ungodly conclusion. “Only God knows,” she sings on the same song. Does he? In Ethel Cain’s mythology, God is weak to the forces of evil. The characters on Preacher’s Daughter wage war and violence with impunity, and only in death do they receive absolution. The spacious world of Perverts, however, is more grounded to the earthly plane than ever before. Every song is infused with quiet longing, pleading entreatments to the listener marred by swirling distortion. Pain is just another medium through which to find fulfillment, a doorway to access the debasement of love.

A fanbase is just another kind of dysfunctional attachment. In a short story Anhedönia wrote to accompany Perverts, dubbed “The Consequence of Audience,” she puzzles through the mystery of disconnection. The stage is both a gift and a burden. She gives us an offering and performs a sacrifice. 

It’s the silence of Perverts that is most unnerving. Why doesn’t she have something to say? Well, what is there to say? The album continues where “من النهر” a muted piano ballad for the Palestinian people released last February, left off; collaged found sound and buried choir vocals blanket the musician’s quiet rage. It makes sense the visuals for Perverts have been in black, white, and shades of gray—it’s a subdued outing from the woman who previously shook her ass on “Gibson Girl.” 

That might frustrate some, but there’s still much to explore in the wintry soundscapes on the monstrous, 15-minute epic “Pulldrone” and the heartbreaking closer “Amber Waves,” a slow-moving ballad led by a lonely electric guitar echoing alongside stirring vocals. “Maybe it’s true/You were nothing to me,” she sings, before the song slowly disintegrates. This ephemeral moment has passed.

These are the kinds of consequences of audience that Anhedönia seems to be talking about, a desire to move through different genres without guilt or pushback. Beautiful balladry can exist alongside vicious noise. It’s called range. In some sense, such a turn only further complicates her mythology rather than truly subverts it. Yet I do wonder if Perverts will be treated as a proper statement or as a mere interlude: “If you love me, keep it to yourself.”