Ethel Cain’s Perverts is accompanied by a short text called “The Consequence Of Audience,” penned by project mastermind Hayden Anhedönia. The piece is presented in the allegorical language of Biblical prophecy, but it’s not too difficult to figure out what she’s really talking about. We encounter Anhedönia walking “through the long, long wood,” an image that equally calls to mind Dante’s “dark wood of error,” the Garden of Eden, and an erection. She is alone and without self-consciousness. But the trees soon part, and she arrives in a clearing, “the rocky expanse that was the Great Dark.” She goes on: “There I saw first face and heard footstep, few and far between, but I was no longer alone. It was a shameful deed to carry these two naked hands as they clenched hotly, now in full display for all to see.”
A domed temple appears on the horizon, and Anhedönia moves toward it. Euphoria overcomes her as she realizes that her observers can follow her to the precipice, but they can’t follow her in. Here the vision goes hazy, and we learn that the temple houses something like the essence of God, or of self-knowledge. Anhedönia then pulls back and reveals that this is not her first journey through this wood; she has already entered the dome and been cast out, forced to repeat the whole humiliating ritual: “I can-not contain the ache for sensation, just as I could not contain the grief as I fell, nor the agony as I crawled my way back to this rocky countryside, and lo! I am on my way there again now.”
Artists offer themselves up for public consumption. That’s the arrangement. Unless you keep all your work in a vault until after your death, you will eventually have to reckon with people’s reactions to the things you make. If enough people embrace the work, you’ll also have to deal with fame, and the history of popular music is littered with examples of what not to do in its glare. “The cautionary tale is the fool’s errand, and I am no fool,” Anhedönia writes, forebodingly, in “The Consequence Of Audience.”
The first Ethel Cain album, 2022’s sprawling, dark-Americana opus Preacher’s Daughter, found a massive audience, and a segment of that audience immediately set about making Anhedönia uncomfortable. She wrote on Tumblr about the “irony epidemic” that had turned her dead-serious lyrics about sex, death, and the divine into meme fodder. Bad fan behavior, the bogeyman that now stalks seemingly every artist with a young fanbase, forced her to make a public statement begging for better show etiquette. (I haven’t seen Ethel Cain live yet, but if someone yells out “mother is mothering” within earshot during “A House In Nebraska,” I can’t be held responsible for whatever happens next.) As the Preacher’s Daughter album cycle wound down, Anhedönia frequently found the music drowned out by noise about her uneasy relationship with fans. Her next move, no matter what it was, would be interpreted as a response.
Well, Perverts is here, with a 90-minute runtime and a defiant allegiance to the least accessible aspects of the Ethel Cain sound. The three longest tracks on the album, including two of its first three songs, are ambient drone pieces. Elsewhere, Anhedönia leans into the whispery minimalism of slowcore pioneers like Codeine and Duster; the constant comparisons to Lana Del Rey that haunted Preacher’s Daughter no longer feel apt. The scant melodies that do exist here tend to be smothered under blankets of pink noise. Anhedönia’s lyrics either lay out esoteric philosophies (“Pulldrone”) or present as enigmatic, fragmented vignettes (“Punish”), betraying a casual disdain for mere “relatability.” On “Vacillator,” the only song on Perverts with drums, she sings, “If you love me, keep it to yourself.” Mother is not mothering.
It’s worth noting that none of the press materials for Perverts actually call it an album. My promo copy refers to it, variously, as a “project,” a “body of work,” and even an “EP,” which would likely make it the longest EP of all time. This scans as a kind of self-defense, or at least a hedged bet from a well-meaning management team. If the next album is the true follow-up to Preacher’s Daughter, then Perverts can be a harmless aberration. Still, there’s no side-stepping the message that if you want to follow Anhedönia into the darkness, you can’t be afraid of what lurks there. So, yes, Perverts is unquestionably a provocation. To Anhedönia’s credit, it’s much more than that, too.
The three big drone pieces on Perverts are as varied as they are bold. The title track opens the album with a creaking, disintegrating recording of the 19th century hymn “Nearer, My God, To Thee”—seemingly sampled rather than sung by Anhedönia, though it’s hard to tell. The next voice is certainly Anhedönia’s, as she intones, “Heaven has forsaken the masturbator,” over ominous synths. The uneasy collision of Christianity and the things it considers perversions has always been close to the center of the Ethel Cain songbook, and here it’s made starker than ever before. “Houseofpsychoticwomn” repeats the phrase “I love you” until it dissolves into meaninglessness, while “Pulldrone” is built around the ancient-sounding hum of a hurdy-gurdy. “Etienne,” while more melodically inclined than the longest drone tracks, recontextualizes the dusty acoustic guitar and plaintive piano of Preacher’s Daughter by making them fight for space in a mix that’s draped with warble and hiss. Anhedönia’s gifts as a producer, perhaps once considered secondary to her writing and singing, come to the fore.
Nestled among the album’s nerviest experiments are two relatively conventional Ethel Cain songs: “Punish” and “Amber Waves.” Both survived an earlier version of Perverts that never came to fruition, where Anhedönia would have explored a different character that society considers a pervert on each song. (Donald Ray Pollock’s harrowing short-story collection Knockemstiff was the initial inspiration.) “Punish” blooms from a simple, descending piano progression similar to the one at the center of Aldous Harding’s “Horizon,” eventually building to a groaning, shoegaze-ish climax. That one’s about a self-mutilating pedophile. “At least that’s what I had in mind [when] I wrote it,” Anhedönia posted on Tumblr. “The song can be whatever you want it to be.”
It’s the album-closing “Amber Waves” that comes closest to fulfilling the somewhat less complicated pleasures of Preacher’s Daughter. An 11-minute ballad about an addict forsaking a lover to get high, the song unfolds patiently without losing focus or breaking its gut-wrenching tension. It has the plushest arrangement of any track on Perverts, with Anhedönia joined by Midwife’s Madeline Johnston on guitar and Vyva Melinkolya’s Angel Diaz on lap steel and electric piano. (Consequently, Johnston and Diaz’s collaborative album Orbweaving, particularly the ambient drone of its title track, now feels in conversation with Perverts.) “Amber Waves” has no real crescendo, no peak in the action. It’s slow and sad and beautiful and then it’s over. Preacher’s Daughter had its share of epic ballads, but they tended to culminate in belting vocal runs or guitar solos. “Amber Waves,” and Perverts, ends with Anhedönia saying, “I can’t feel anything.”
It’s hard to know what the many fans who made Ethel Cain into a niche pop star will make of Perverts. Some of them will surely be pushed outside of their comfort zones and learn that they’re interested in drone, ambient music, and slowcore. Others will jump ship. Whatever the split is, Anhedönia has cleared a path for herself, proving that the Ethel Cain project can go anywhere she wants it to. She’s also cast a protection spell, creating an invisible wall between her and anybody who can’t hang. If you’re willing to walk the long, long wood with her, though, I’d wager that Anhedönia still has more secrets to reveal.
Perverts is out 1/8 on Daughters Of Cain.
Other albums of note out this week:
• Franz Ferdinand’s The Human Fear
• Ringo Starr’s Look Up
• Lambrini Girls’ Who Let The Dogs Out
• Moonchild Sanelly’s Full Moon
• Tremonti’s The End Will Show Us How
• Inside Voices’ If It Matters
• zzzahara’s Spiral Your Way Out
• Zeta’s Was It Medicine To You?
• Otis Kane’s Violet
• Bethel Music’s We Must Respond
• W4RP Trio’s Sermon Of The MatriarK
• Ben Barnes’ Where The Light Gets
• The Halo Effect’s March Of The Unheard
• Stick To Your Guns’ Keep Planting Flowers
• RockGati’s Elephants
• Nick Stefanacci’s En Fuego
• Steve Bryant’s New Town
• 7xvethegenius’ Death Of Deuce (Deluxe)
• Cave In’s Jupiter (25th Anniversary Reissue) box set
• Dark Fortress’ Anthems From Beyond The Grave live album
• Sondre Lerche’s Sea Of Sighs EP
• My Wonderful Boyfriend’s An Evening With… EP
• Ghosten’s Reductor EP
• Ex Deo’s Year Of The Four Emperors EP
