Ethel Cain Is Not Here for Your Amusement
With ‘Perverts,’ the spectral artist rejects encroaching fame with noisy static and echoes from the void.
Following the runaway success of her 2022 debut album Preacher’s Daughter, Ethel Cain seemed poised to scale the indie-rock ladder. She opened for Florence and the Machine, Caroline Polachek, and Boygenius. She played Coachella and Central Park. She built a loyal social media following that was equally enamored with her hot takes about The Legend of Zelda franchise, her eerie home videos of rural America, and her Miu Miu runway moments. She even appeared on Forbes’ 30 Under 30 music list alongside mainstream pop upstarts Gracie Abrams and Reneé Rapp. But just because Ethel Cain, aka Hayden Anhedönia, could be very famous, it didn’t mean she wanted to be very famous.
Anhedönia bristled at her newfound notoriety. When Barack Obama placed her song “American Teenager” on one of his annual playlists, she jabbed back, “Did not have a former president including my anti-war, anti-patriotism fake pop song on his end of year list on my 2022 bingo.” She’s claimed to have turned down collaborations with big, unnamed stars. And she’s fed up with the unserious way her ballooning cult treats her and her art. “I’m honest to god so turned off by so much of the way people engage with the shit I do and with most things in general. It’s so beyond frustrating,” she wrote last year on the relatively barren and outdated social media platform Tumblr. “I’m so stressed out already anticipating the stupid shit I’m gonna have to see about perverts lol.”
Perverts is Ethel Cain’s new album. If you thought she would build out the mythology of Preacher’s Daughter or stunt with another crossover hit like “American Teenager,” you’d be mistaken. Most of the songs on Perverts confidently pass the 10-minute mark, and the project as a whole is over an hour and a half long. Baleful piano, crackling static, echoing croaks, and swirling witch-house ambience abound. Instead of sparkling hooks, Ethel Cain deploys heavily distorted whispers like demonic ASMR. Only a few songs contain distinguishable lyrics. In their place are strands of old hymnals and fragmentary field recordings threaded across the album like ghostly signals beamed in from a 19th-century seance. The result is startlingly opaque. “I miss when I had like 20 fans who actually had something interesting to say in response to what I was making,” she wrote in that same Tumblr missive, and it’s easy to read Perverts as a means to winnow her following.
