It’s just new Ethel Cain music — it can’t hurt you. But nonetheless, the alt-pop maven is freaking fans out with her new project, Perverts. The new release is 90 minutes of drone, ambient, and slowcore music across nine tracks, none shorter than six minutes and many longer than ten. In other words, it’s not the followup to her 2022 breakout Preacher’s Daughter that most fans expected. Cain herself isn’t even calling the new project an album. Back in 2023, she told Interview that this was “the direction that I’ve always wanted to go,” adding, “I feel a bit more confident doing that and less worried about what people will think.” That’s good, because they think it’s scary.
Perverts isn’t exactly a full left turn for an artist who emerged on the scene with a fully formed Southern Gothic backstory. Cain is the stage name/character of Hayden Anhedönia, conceived as the daughter of a Baptist deacon who runs off with an abusive boyfriend who eventually kills her. Anhedönia/Cain has teased a trilogy of albums for the project, along with novels and a film. But if you’re too scared to make it through Perverts, don’t worry — it doesn’t seem to be directly part of the Ethel Cain narrative, even if it is replete with her usual dark religious imagery.
So why’d she release Perverts? Cain accompanied the project with a story she called “The Consequence of Audience.” In it, she described walking through a dark woods to find a magnificent temple that only she could enter. “Who would not climb the wall for a peer over the edge?” she writes. “The cautionary tale is the fool’s errand, and I am no fool.” Some, like Stereogum’s Brad Sanders, have related that story to Cain’s Tumblr comments last year about the “irony epidemic” that led fans to turn her dark and serious songs from Preacher’s Daughter into memes. It seems like Cain wanted to get back to making music for herself, that fans couldn’t hijack. And if you’re too creeped out to listen to Perverts all the way through, that’s a success.
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