Following the success of her first sleeper-hit album, the most recent musical project by Hayden Silas Anhedönia, known as Ethel Cain on stage, was not what most fans expected.
Personally, I was not surprised nor disappointed. The marathon of an EP, “Perverts” is not for everyone, and pushes the very boundaries of what music can be.
Anhedönia, who creates work under the persona Ethel Cain, received critical acclaim and a cult-like following for her debut project “Preacher’s Daughter” in 2022. The record, lauded for its ambitious and haunting storytelling, follows the life and death of Cain through her relationships and religious trauma.
After deliriously thrashing through a fever while the album reached its dark crescendo on the infamous track “Ptolmea,” I was hooked.
The religious and southern gothic themes deeply resonated with my formerly Catholic, half-Carolinian heart, and felt oddly fitting while I was sweating out a fever.
While “Perverts” is made under the same pseudonym, I don’t believe it’s a continuation of Cain’s story. While the songs have related themes of sexual deviance and pain, there is no discernable overall narrative being told.
I believe it is based more in her personal theology that she explains in a YouTube video titled “the ring, the great dark and proximity to god.”
In the video, she describes “the ring,” an otherworldly feeling she has when listening to transcendent music by artists like Florence and the Machine, explaining that it is what God feels like to her.
Based on this and other sporadic social media posts, I knew this EP would be even more experimental than her first genre-defying project.
Without words, rhythm or melody, certain songs on “Perverts” push the very idea of what music is.
Some believe it was a culling of her “fake” fans that only enjoy her more palatable songs like “American Teenager.” In my fangirl opinion, Cain is a true artist who makes the work she wants to make regardless of the audience. Bias aside, the themes are highly intertextual and thought-provoking, and I truly experienced the God she described while listening to the first half of the EP.
After removing my headphones, I felt almost as if I had woken up from a nap that was too long, stuck in a limbo of not feeling real and not really wanting to. I especially felt pulled into “the ring” during the crescendo of “Punish,” where a resonant electric guitar chord comes in over echoing vocals repeating “I am punished by love.”
Another standout was “Onanist,” where the narrator’s choice of pleasure over God’s love is met with a massive wall of sound. I could only imagine hearing this song live and feeling it reverberate in my chest.
Listening to the song “Pulldrone,” which described the stages of “the ring,” while walking through last week’s snowstorm felt like an Ari Aster film. The relentless, atmospheric and hopeless sounds really brought home the freezing sensation in my fingers.
In general, listening to this EP is an exercise in patience and meditation. Most tracks are extremely long and songs like “Vascillator” have an agonizingly slow tempo.
It is also very dark and oftentimes frightening, which can be a comfort for many.
Comedian Chris Fleming said it best: enjoying horror is like “taking [your] anxiety to the dog park.” For the 1.5-hour runtime of “Perverts” heavy emotions pound eardrums, moving out of the mind and through the body. It’s hard to feel anxiety about the state of the world when your skull is full of oppressive sound.
To best listen to this EP, go on a long walk in a desolate wood, but not at night unless you want to scare the shit out of yourself. Be present with the music.
Maybe you won’t like it, or maybe you’ll find that you like to simply exist in your body and feel something.
