Ethel Cain – Perverts (2025)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 01:29:22 minutes | 839 MB | Genre: Dark Ambient, Drone
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Daughters of Cain Records
Perverts is the upcoming studio recording by American singer-songwriter and record producer Ethel Cain. It is set to be released on January 8, 2025, and will mark her first release since her 2022 album, Preacher’s Daughter. The lead single, “Punish”, was released on November 1, 2024.
Ethel Cain released her debut studio album, Preacher’s Daughter, in 2022, to critical acclaim. It centered on the fictional character of the same name, and contained Southern Gothic imagery and themes including religious indoctrination, sexual violence, isolation, and family trauma.Following its release, the album was included in several year-end lists of best music and she garnered a cult following online.If you are hoping for another catchy, engaging album of gothic folk-meets-indie rock-meets Cranberries-style pop songs à la Ethel Cain’s 2022 debut Preacher’s Daughter, then Perverts is destined to be a shock to the system. For the most part, Cain has abandoned traditional song structure in favor of free-form ambience that stretches up to 15 minutes per track. The title song is an immediate test of whether or not you’re willing to stick with the experiment. Starting like a spooky a capella field recording of the hymn “Nearer My God to Thee,” it veers into extended periods of silence punctuated with fuzzy mumbles and the sort of vacuum-pressure noise that you inherently feel in an airplane cabin, before it finally evolves into a horror-movie sound-bath drone. Blessedly, Cain’s ethereal voice drifts in on “Punish.” She has said the song 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,” and the lyrics reference Gary Plauché, a Louisiana man who killed the karate instructor who kidnapped his 11-year-old son in 1984: “In the morning I will mar myself again/ He was a natural Plauché, saying, ‘You won’t forget this’/ Shame is sharp, and my skin gives so easy.” It’s sung over delicate, glacial-pace piano; meanwhile, “Vacillator” is slow-moving dirge, its rhythmic percussion low in the mix and encrusted—a barely-moving stone proudly gathering moss. (Older Cain tracks “A House in Nebraska” and “Hard Times” are ballads, but they do nothing to prepare you for this.)
When Cain doesn’t sing, and there are many of these moments on Perverts, you truly miss her voice. And when she does, it is otherworldly, transporting; each word sounds so fragile, it’s like speaking them faster or louder might actually injure her. (There is no sign anywhere of the vocal strength that carried excellent older songs like “Michelle Pfeiffer” or “American Teenager.”) “Houseofpsychoticwomn” creeps in like a fog with shadowy whispers in the undertow. “Onanist”—maybe about general self-gratification, or maybe a cigar is just a cigar and it’s simply about masturbation—feels transmitted from some other era and world: Cain’s vocals are clouded in a fantasy filter of echo and mist before a buzzsaw vibration brutally slices through. “Pulldrone” is a 15-minute spoken poem about insatiable cravings; it’s worth noting that Cain is the stage moniker of Hayden Silas Anhedönia, whose adopted surname is also a condition that makes it difficult to experience pleasure from things that were once pleasurable. “I will dislocate my jaw to fit it all in … I want to know what God knows,” Cain sings. “… I am what I am and I am nothing.” Put another way: Can an album be atmospheric when there is an absence of atmosphere? – Shelly Ridenour
Tracklist:
1-1. Ethel Cain – Perverts (12:04)
1-2. Ethel Cain – Punish (06:40)
1-3. Ethel Cain – Housofpsychoticwomn (13:35)
1-4. Ethel Cain – Vacillator (07:44)
1-5. Ethel Cain – Onanist (06:24)
1-6. Ethel Cain – Pulldrone (15:14)
1-7. Ethel Cain – Etienne (08:43)
1-8. Ethel Cain – Thatorchia (07:24)
1-9. Ethel Cain – Amber Waves (11:32)