To understand the haunted genius that is Perverts, we have to get through the preliminaries first: Hayden Silas Anhedönia has been making music under the pseudonym Ethel Cain for the better part of the last ten years. She grew up in a Southern Baptist household in the tropical morass of Florida with three other brothers and sisters. The daughter of a deacon, Anhedönia was home-schooled and surrounded by music. All of this is important to understand moving forward: the religion, the music, the schooling.
The second preliminary is to familiarize yourself with her earlier work as Ethel Cain and then slowly work your way forward her prolific catalogue. Her music demands patience. The songs move at their own pace, deceptively glacial in their craftsmanship. Her earliest work was drenched in reverb and complex vocal manipulations. Draped in pop music that seems enveloped by a motion-dampening sheen, Ethel Cain‘s early EPs insisted that you burrow deep. But compared to Perverts, her prior recordings were made from a space that was still developing into self-awareness. Perverts is discovering the heavy weight of full-blown sentience. This is the second thing you must be willing to embrace: there is a gradual awakening, and it’s an awakening that happens within the polymer covered walls of a sedative, a bottle of zolpidem on the bedside table beside a half-drank glass of red wine.
The third thing you need to understand is that Ethel Cain‘s talent has not gone unnoticed. Her song “American Teenager” off of Preacher’s Daughter was chosen by Barack Obama as one of his songs of the year, and she’s shared stages with such upstart luminaries as Florence and the Machine, boygenius, Mitski, and Caroline Polachek. Her career started in 2019 with the release of her Carpet Bed EP record. Perverts is her seventh release and the second full album she’s recorded. Each of these records serves as a giant, sometimes painful, step in defining her remarkable trajectory. All of this- the religion, the music, the schooling, the pace, the stage, and the recognition- has led to one of the most unique metamorphoses in all of popular music.
Anhedönia’s music is deeply spiritual without conforming to any set structure. She acknowledges the existence of God and Jesus often in her lyrics, but there’s such an undercurrent of intensity to her pleas, that it’s hard not to accept these beliefs as scientific truths. There’s nothing ‘funny’ about the music that she makes as Ethel Cain, and perhaps therein lies the power: devoid of excuses and free of the social shroud each of us bury our grief under, Ethel Cain allows us to tap into the darkest sides of our psyche without apology. It is fiercely committed and sometimes violent music, without ever overtly crossing over into the world of the grotesque. In other words, this is some serious shit.
And, trust me, Perverts digs deep, deep, deep. At times it’s brutally uncomfortable. The title song opens the album and with it the open wounds of believers who are wrapped in unbearable shame. Tapping into her Southern Baptist roots, the album starts off with a haunting, garbled version of the 19th century hymnal “Nearer My God To Thee” before the repeated mantra of ‘Heaven has forsaken the masturbator’. A single drone permeates the background as a muffled industrial moan ekes its way to the forefront. Occasional eruptions of noise burst through, as if on the edge of orgasmic release. It’s an audacious, twelve-minute exploration of the shame induced by self-gratification, and it’s a horrifying opening. ‘No one you know is a good person,’ exclaims Anhedönia, and it’s at this point that you realize any connection Ethel Cain may have with the mainstream has been fully, unceremoniously castrated.
It’s so sonically distant from Barack’s favorite “American Teenager” that it’s hard to believe it’s the same artist. And yet, Anhedönia’s embellished art-pop from Preacher’s Daughter is still wrapped in pain and insecurity. At times, pre-Perverts Ethel Cain sounds as if Shania Twain had just returned to the recording studio after two weeks in a Southwestern desert eating LSD and undergoing elaborate ayahuasca rituals. Perverts-era Ethel Cain sounds like eating LSD and ayahuasca while masturbating and crying at the same time underneath a three-foot crucifix in a basement bedroom. In either case there’s a ritual wrapped up in the performative art Anhedönia presents to her listener, regardless of what is being worshipped.
In this case the worship called into question is a physical one that is hopelessly entwined with the psychological one, the impact of our individual desires on our self-worth. Couple this with the all-seeing eye of God and you have a rather perfect storm of shame and regret that’s put on repeat. While Anhedönia’s perversion seems to be centered around masturbation, it’s much, much more than that. It’s a perversion that starts immediately after birth, and the songs on Perverts seem to emanate from the placental fluids of the womb, embraced by the uterus, from zygotes to humans to perverts. There but by the grace of God, Ethel Cain seems to say (sometimes literally), all the while willfully participating in an emotional fall to the bottom. In other words, all of us are perverts.
There are four songs on the lengthy album that go well beyond the ten minute mark. And, in a way, the songs give you enough space to sit with the pain she’s trying to communicate, to grasp it and make it your own. Perverts begins in the womb and seems to end there as well, a lifelong quest to go back to the beginning. “Housofpsychoticwomn” swirls in the midst of all of this, two fingers between the legs, eyes closed in pain and ecstasy. ‘I love you, I love you, I love you’ she implores, as if insisting the act itself comes from a place of love, a love which she attributes to ‘it’, whatever that may be. The phrases are buried under effects and in the mix, as if in the midst of a fever dream. If an act of self-love isn’t really an act of self-love at all, then all it does is separate us from the cold reality that spins around us endlessly.
“The Onanist” gets right to the point. It’s a soundtrack for being deep within the twisted psyche of masturbatory guilt, a place of no escape but of finite shape. A mistuned piano, drenched in the placental fluids of birth, Anhedönia’s voice drifting up from the bottom of a lake of sorrow, and a burst of distorted sound recognize a feeling of no escape, and an endless cycle of remorse. Nowhere on the album do her lyrics hit harder and more to the point than this morbid celebration of self-gratification:
‘There I found me in a long, long wood
Astray, midway of mortal life
Witness to such agony
But there, before the grace of God go I
I want to know love
I want to know what it feels like‘It feels good
It feels good’
By the time, Anhedönia recites those final three words it’s as if they are moaned in orgasmic shame, and this leads right into “Pulldrone”, another ten-minute plus opus. “Pulldrone” acts as a foundation for Ethel Cain‘s ten commandments. It’s worship music undone, a funeral in reverse, the coffin being lifted from the grave. It’s an anti-labor song in the sense that once we are propelled into this world, it’s nothing but tragedy from there, a lifetime of wiping the placental fluids off of our bodies only in a quest to crawl back into the womb. It’s a snake-church celebration, birth as a moment of the ultimate despair. The music on Perverts is clearly cinematic, and Anhedönia has pointed this out in several interviews, but that soundtrack is something darker than anything Ari Aster has mustered up. “Pulldrone” devolves into a consistent drone that’s as unsettling as a dentist’s drill. It’s a magnificent, thrilling, and terrifying fifteen minutes of misery.
If “Pulldrone” represents the climax, the final three songs bring to light the falling action and the final resolution of Anhedönia’s soundscape. “Etienne” is, perhaps, the most optimistic of the songs on an album that is so far down in despair it’s hard to see the light. It’s the sound of post-orgasmic clarity and post-labor joy wrapped up in one slimy sheen of parturition- the sound of acceptance. Like coming up to the sun from being buried deep underwater, “Etienne” relies on steady forward motion, a few notes repeated on a piano as an acoustic guitar organically provides sustenance for the simple melody. The spoken word outro is the light permeating the ever-shifting waves of water, a brief glimpse of hope into a life consistently warped through the perversions of existence.
But lest you think Ethel Cain is offering a way of escape from this mortal coil, the penultimate song “Thatorchia”, reminds us that we are all simply products of our biology, God be damned. It’s a sonic exploration of organogenesis, cells combining to become a complex being, zygote to blastocyst, neurons connecting to form what we know as consciousness. Perverts seems to suggest that while we wallow in our own self-reflective misery, this isn’t so much a fault of our own conscious decision making as it is simply a product of being born. Capable of great things, humans tend to gravitate to the shallowness of self-pleasure, and if this is a product of biology, then who are we to criticize it?
“Amber Waves” closes the album. It’s a simple, straight-forward slowcore resolution, and is probably the only way to end an album of such excruciating pain. The most literal song on the album, considering the emotional chaos rendered before it, there are multiple entry points to try and make sense of what Anhedönia is trying to communicate. It may be that the amber waves she speaks of are simply choices one makes to bury the shame and the pain- drugs, sex, alcohol, or self-harm all act as placental replacements, a way of crawling back into the womb.
‘ I still kick rocks when the walking is good
And pretend at the chain link that I am the wood
As I’m leaning my head back
Saying ‘Take me, I ain’t gonna scream‘
Yеt here I am empty
Watching lovе of mine leave
But I’ll be alright
Me and my amber waves
I’ll be alright, I’ll be alright, I’ll be alright‘
And with that, a demand for acceptance, the hour and fifteen minute Perverts comes to an end, credits over a black screen, head bowed with cheeks covered in tears.
Ethel Cain‘s latest album was made to alienate, but it was clearly made from an artistic space that demanded more room. On a surface level, Anhedönia taps into a wealth of post-modern luminaries, from the abrasive industrial noise of Throbbing Gristle, the dark, caustic sounds of Swans, to the expansive drones of Sunn O))), all the while sounding tremendously and unapologetically unique. And that’s what makes this album so remarkable: it could have only come from the singular vision of a singular being growing up in the insular, humid home of a Florida Southern Baptist family, home-schooled and alone. It’s an autobiography that resonates in such a way that we realize our bodies all vibrate at similar frequencies, and while that should be a solace to us all, there are perversions all around us, threatening to rip us away from the womb we so desperately want to return to.
