Since the release of debut album Preacher’s Daughter in 2022, Ethel Cain – the southern gothic alter ego of 26-year-old Hayden Silas Anhedönia – has built the sort of fervent, largely young, often queer cult following that seemed to hint at an imminent tip into the overground. Perverts, not a follow-up album proper but an avant garde, experimental “project” largely consisting of elongated, ambient soundscapes that wouldn’t feel out of place on the Nosferatu soundtrack, suggests that Cain’s preferred trajectory lies elsewhere.
Where lead single Punish – one of the only tracks that could even vaguely fit that brief – offers up a melancholy, meditative through line from the more introverted elements of her debut, the bulk of Perverts sheds any algorithmic alignment entirely. Housofpsychoticwomn is a 13-minute-plus submersion into the sparse and industrial, its only lyric a repeated, increasingly uncomfortable “I love you”. The grainy recording and desolate piano motif of Onanist is as solitary as its title. Cain’s talent has always been world-building, and on her newest she operates within its most uncompromising outskirts. The result is perhaps the most wilful perversion of all: an artist on the brink of stardom who seems to be actively pushing it away.
