Ethel Cain - Perverts

Hayden Andehönia, the rising force behind Ethel Cain, wants to be more than a musician. She recently revealed her desire to be a filmmaker above all else, expanding her repertoire and with it Ethel’s world, comparing her art to Lord of the Rings and Legend of Zelda, rooted in narrative but with a seemingly endless series of offshoots and side-projects. The notion is carried into ‘Perverts’, a 90-minute, nine-track opus underpinned by an experimental drone and hushed vocals; a vast sidestep from 2022 debut album ‘Preacher’s Daughter’, it’s another layer in an already haunting catalogue of writings, musings and visuals that are steadily forming an expansive universe in Ethel Cain’s name. That ‘Perverts’ purposefully presents itself as a project rather than an album across much of Hayden’s carefully crafted preamble to its release is telling, unfurling as an eerie soundtrack to Ethel’s ever-sprawling story, and an unsettling, contorted collection of sound. 

The first glimpse of the project, ‘Punish’, foregoes much of the melody in favour of the occasional doom soundscapes of her debut album proper, while still offering perhaps the most accessible track when sat against the nightmarish spoken-word and jarring 15-minute drawl of the appropriately titled ‘Pulldrone’, or the bleak minimalism of ‘Housofpsychoticwomn’. It also makes it impossible to assess in the traditional sense; a rating feels like a flimsy attempt to quantify the record’s polarising creative confidence. It is by all accounts a piece of art forged in a conceptual space that more often than not foregoes Hayden’s voice entirely, glimmering in the hazy white noise of the past, born from late 1800s folklore and heavily inspired by an ever-twisting cocktail of horror and nostalgia. Respite arrives in its sparse vocal moments, ‘Punish’ accompanied only by the melancholic beauty of ‘Vacillator’, the instrumental reprieve of ‘Etienne’, and the closing moment on ‘Amber Waves’. Elsewhere darkness and doom prevail. Just how enjoyable that is depends entirely on how much you are prepared to embrace the darkness, and to submit to Ethel Cain’s semi-fictional world.