Listen back to Ethel Cain’s 2022 debut Preacher’s Daughter and you’ll hear glimmers of the bold turn into dark ambient she has now taken with Perverts. Around the edges of the widescreen shots of ambivalent American life crept deep, disorienting terror; the Florida-born artist may have swung for the fences with the cavernous snare and pearly guitar tones of “American Teenager,” but she also groaned against a loop of buzzing flies in the opening bars of “Ptolemaea.” Her second LP now zooms close on the rot undergirding her Southern Gothic storytelling. Splayed between Nurse With Wound and Grouper, it sheds the cathartic American songwriting traditions that earned Cain a dedicated following among sleep-deprived Tumblr kids and former U.S. presidents. There are no more open roads or dreams of escape in this dimly lit hell. While Preacher’s Daughter spilled with expansive landscapes, detailed scenes, and plenty of characters to populate them, Perverts holes up in the Blair Witch basement or the hermetically sealed house of Skinamarink. It’s 89 minutes of claustrophobia and dread attenuated by gentle clearings. What scant relief it offers comes in whispers.
The album opens—courageously and brilliantly—with a terrifying 12-minute title track. Full of warbling hymns, indecipherable dialogue, and gaunt silences, “Perverts” is the kind of recording that might well take on a life of its own as creepypasta, believed to curse and haunt its listener, much like the Caretaker’s music did in 2020. When you hear a garbled voice issuing a command you feel compelled to obey or else, and you can’t make out at all what it’s saying? That’s good horror. Right off the bat, “Perverts” plunges you into the stew of your own anxiety.
Between spoken-word ruminations on sexual shame—“Masturbator!” Cain spits from the shadows—emerge slow-burning songs of delicate intimacy. Her voice has never sounded better than it does on “Onanist,” “Punish,” and “Amber Waves”; multi-tracked over the smog of distorted guitars, it scrapes off the lacquer that clung to it on earlier releases. By releasing herself from concrete narratives and pop payoffs, Cain veers into some of her most complex and emotive vocal performances yet. A song like “Punish” doesn’t tell a story you can imagine on a movie screen, but it does constellate profound feelings of nausea, rejection, and powerlessness. “Nature chews on me,” Cain muses against reverberating piano, a slight voice pressing against the great maw of the world.
Perverts is an awful lot to take in one sitting, and it often feels split between two distinct aesthetic modes: the wistful chill of slow but structured songs, and the brutal unmooring of eerie ambient collages. Both styles converge thematically on the same tortured core, but the switch between them can cause whiplash. On the 13-and-a-half-minute “Housofpsychoticwomn,” an artificially deepened voice repeats “I love you” to the point where it starts to sound like a threat—a rumination on how love can manipulate and punish its object as easily as it can comfort. Immediately after that exercise in white-knuckling, the album transitions into the jarringly gentle “Vacillator,” which rises shining and clean, by comparison, from the toxic swamp.
If Preacher’s Daughter cast a penetrating lens on the violence embedded in the institutions of the church, the couple, and the nuclear family, Perverts tightens Cain’s scope to the lone, distraught human body. American Christian upbringings warn against physical pleasure, inculcating a fundamental conflict at the level of the senses. The body seeks and rewards sexual release; the church condemns it; self-loathing weaves into self-satisfaction. Perverts sifts through the psychic wreckage of that conundrum. Cain has always rendered triumph from abjection. Here, she discards the impulse to soar out of darkness and opens her mouth to let it in instead.
