Ethel Cain : Perverts


With the release of her 2022 debut album Preacher’s Daughter, Hayden Silas Anhedönia—better known as Ethel Cain—established herself as an alternative music darling. Through Cain’s blend of Americana, slowcore and pop, as well as her approach to narrative writing, Preacher’s Daughter strikes a compelling balance of being at times dark while still melodically accessible. Perverts couldn’t be any more different, for Cain’s newest project sees the artist venturing down a far more ominous and ethereal path.
There’s very little melodic warmth throughout Perverts. Cain embraces the harsh and compelling depths of drone, distortion and power electronics, presenting a surreal and otherworldly experience. While drone heavily relies on repetition, artists who understand the medium’s capabilities know that it can have a more complex emotional effect, depending on how that repetition is deployed. In the case of Perverts’ roughly one hour and 30 minute runtime, Cain uses drone to create and elevate feelings of melancholy, tension and mystery.
The album’s opening title track is a prime example of this: a low-sounding drone stirs before a splash of buzzing and shrieking, leading to Cain’s distorted voice singing the Christian hymn, “Nearer, My God, to Thee.” Following this passage, her voice disappears and is replaced by that low drone. With no other musical elements at play, the drone roars. You may feel an itch to shift in your seat—what’s to come next? Then, suddenly, Cain’s voice appears, heavily distorted, the message muffled through the drone. She says, “Heaven has forsaken the masturbator.”
Over the course of 12-minutes “Perverts” unfolds, Cain introduces additional noise elements as she twists the song’s composition with varying tonal intensity. While Cain embraces the repetitious nature of drone, she’s also incorporates stylistic variety in her use of noise, and perhaps more importantly, she showcases an incredible command over pacing, texture, and structure. On “Punish,” Cain spends most of the track providing melodic piano playing as a minimal wail of sound plays behind her. This wail continues until the track’s noise effects blossom; the wail erupts into a bloom of distortion, droning heavily and warping, suffocating the
track’s melodic portions.
Through her texturing of sound and careful delivery of tonal shifts, Cain crafts an intoxicating air of suspense and wonder on Perverts. The atmosphere throughout the record strikes an exciting middle ground of tangible and metaphysical; in one moment, the shriek and grinding of noise may rattle you with a chill, and then following that, a dense ominous drone may carry you away into another shade of haunting.
Further fueling Perverts’ unnerving atmosphere are Cain’s lyrics, in which she plunges into darker narrative depths. As she explores topics of shame, sexuality, the perverse and more, Cain’s lyrics operate on a cerebral level of thought, providing layers of meaning and potential interpretation to engage with.
One example of this is the song “Onanist.” An “Onanist” is someone who masturbates, and in the song, Cain provides a spoken word segment heavily inspired by the opening of Dante Alighieri’s The Divine Comedy. She says: “There I found me in a long, long wood / Astray, midway of mortal life / Witness to such agony / But there, before the grace of God go I / I want to know love / I want to know what it feels like.” In Alighieri’s poem, when he speaks of the woods and being lost, he’s alluding to suicide. In “Onanist,” Cain takes Alighieri’s suicide allegory and meshes it with a concept of self-gratification, creating a mystifying concoction of philosophy to mull over.
Her philosophical drive is even greater in the song “Pulldrone,” a 15-minute piece that pairs drone and power electronic dynamics as Cain unravels in mystical intrigue: “One, apathy / I am what I am and I am nothing / Two, disruption / There goes a great shudder through the muscle / A shimmering of bells through the mist / Three, curiosity / One quick moment to crane the neck / I have always possessed the insatiable need to see what happens inside the room.”
Perverts also contains some of the more intimate narratives in the vein of what Cain presented on Preacher’s Daughter. On “Etienne,” Cain speaks of someone wanting to end their life—so they run, and keep running, until they realize the running has led them to want to live. And of course, accompanying all the lyrical intensity of Cain’s lyrics are her darkly surreal displays of drone and noise instrumentation, which play nicely into the record’s meditative nature.
Perverts is a hell of a swing. Cain could have made Preacher’s Daughter 2.0, which would have been satisfying enough. Instead, she opted for a gargantuan work of unrelenting drone and ambient noise. It’s an overwhelming testimony to Cain’s artistry and her ability to push her craft through experimentation.
Label: Daughters of Cain
Year: 2025
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A graduate of Columbia College Chicago's Creative Writing Program, Michael Pementel is a published music journalist, specializing in metal and its numerous subgenres. Along with his work for Treble and Bloody Disgusting, he has also written for Consequence of Sound, Metal Injection, Dread Central, Electronic Gaming Monthly and the Funimation blog.