God Bless Perverts

Detail from the Ecstasy of Saint Teresa (1647–1652 | Gian Lorenzo Bernini / Photograph by Tullio Saba / Public domain

Preacher’s Daughter, Hayden Anhedönia’s debut studio album under her alias Ethel Cain, garnered her critical acclaim and a cult following online. Preacher’s Daughter splayed out the narrative of a young woman reckoning with her abusive father’s death, abandoning her Christian community in Alabama, and running away west. As the album progresses, Cain becomes involved with dangerous men, including one who ultimately kidnaps, kills, and cannibalizes her. The vulnerable, toxic hyperfemininity and dark Americana backdrop reminiscent of Lana Del Rey and Courtney Love made Preacher’s Daughter an instant classic; Billboard and Rolling Stone list tracks like “American Teenager” as one of the best LGBTQ songs of all time. 

So those expecting the new Ethel Cain album to pick up where its predecessor left off will find Perverts frustrating. Released on January 8, 2025, under Cain’s label, Daughters of Cain, Perverts festers around the same themes of abuse and the longing for escape, but there are no distinct characters here, only unnamed narrators like the “vacillator” or the “onanist.” The nine-track album wails and wanes through its 91-minute run, titillating between hammering, almost surgical, instrumentals and Cain’s wistful swan-song vocals. In Perverts, sex is a source of trauma and disgust; perhaps more surprisingly, so is the search to be closer to God. Between narrators unable to escape the cycle of abuse and narrators who seek spirituality to the point of sickness, the listener may begin to wonder: Who’s the pervert? 

Ethel Cain is fascinated by the pull of self-gratification to feel closer to some non-distinct God—and that pull’s failures. The first line of the first song, “Perverts,” is a recitation of “Nearer, My God, to Thee.” The nineteenth-century Christian hymn retells Jacob’s dream of being close to God. That desire isn’t enough, however: The album still falls into perversion.

Listening to Perverts is uncomfortable—in theme, lyrics, sound. It’s sexually, romantically, spiritually sick. “Punish,” the lead single, details the story of a pedophile who, after being shot by the child’s father, inflicts self-harm to punish himself. Over disjointed piano, the lyrics claim, “I was an angel, but they made me leave,” before the song gluts itself on oppressive electric guitar. “Vacillator” adopts the perspective of a lover who gets off on denying their partners’ desire for connection and commitment. The song’s beat and lyrics flatline in the repeating lullaby, “If you love me, keep it to yourself.”

At the album’s climax, “Pulldrone” drags you through 15 minutes of ruthless industrial noise. Cain wrote, in a now deleted post on Tumblr, “all drone music for me is part erotic, part meditative. it’s deeply indulgent and euphoric for me, in different ways for different tracks.” Is this God, or self-gratification? The following quiet disharmony of “Etienne” and “Thatorchia” is nauseating. A voice on “Etienne” narrates a suicidal man going on a run to induce a heart attack, but, after running for so long, too long, not wanting to die anymore. Told by a different artist, such a narrative might be uplifting. For Cain, both the man’s pursuit of release and his experience of enlightenment are absurd, if not delusional. Yet his story of trying, and failing, to escape fate is believable.       

In the world of Ethel Cain, it turns out that your standard sort of pervert—one who “turns away from what is good or true or morally right”—isn’t more morally compromised than the person desperately pursuing closeness to God, addicted to the high of self-actualization and unable to see it. And then again, what about the person who’s listening to such music and hoping to feel better about the world? Maybe Perverts has something for everyone.

“Amber Waves” closes the album. If Perverts is the debauched pursuit of self-gratification, then “Amber Waves” is the exhale after, the serene return to suffering. “Days go by, time on without me,” Cain sings. The final line “I can’t feel anything” would usually be a bleak note to close on—except that coming at the end of Perverts, the confession sounds more like companionship.