Ethel Cain does not return so much as she resurrects. In her sophomore album Perverts, Cain presents a reckoning—a blood-warm, unrestrained confession that trades the windswept Southern Gothic of Preacher’s Daughter for something far more haunting. If her debut was a sprawling Cranberries-esque epic of lost innocence, Perverts is the aftermath: bruised and breathless, the body left behind now takes inventory of its own decay.
Where Preacher’s Daughter often soared, Perverts lingered in the chest, low and bruised.
Cain’s vocals, once the emotional anchor of her music, take a backseat on Perverts, a shift that makes the album feel more distant but undeniably more experimental. The album opens with a 12-minute title track that terrifies. With its distorted hymns and desolate silences, it primes listeners for an unrelentingly tense experience. Where Preacher’s Daughter often soared, Perverts lingered in the chest, low and bruised. Songs like the title track feature scant, distorted whispers that seem to castigate. Cain solidifies a massive departure from the epic ballads that wiggled their way into the mainstream. However, beneath the arresting drones and hums of production, Cain’s vocals emerge nonetheless. There are stunning harmonies scattered all over Perverts. In the album’s 11-minute final track, “Amber Waves,” one minute and forty-seven seconds go by before her soft, somber voice comes to the fore. Her voice is not delivered serendipitously. It is withheld, and those with patience are rewarded with a complex vocal performance that surpasses previous releases in terms of depth.
Lyrically, Perverts deepens Cain’s preoccupation with cycles of sin and salvation, the push and pull of pleasure and punishment. But whereas Preacher’s Daughter cast its tragedies in a biblical light—martyrdom as an inevitability—Perverts pushes its representation to a more tragically somber, solitary territory. This new release also departs from commentary on institutions like the nuclear family and church to hone in on the experience of the isolated individual. “Vacillator,” the fourth track on Perverts, supplants us in Cain’s daunting exploration of sin, flesh, and guilty pleasures. The song is wrapped in overtly sexual lyrics but ends with seven repetitions of the devastating lines, “If you love me, keep it to yourself.” There is a lonely nature to Cain’s lyrics, as if the droning ambient sounds have placed her within a vacuum. Perverts seemed to shift the purpose of Cain’s lyrical payoff. Cain weaved a singular storytelling thread through Preacher’s Daughter, which follows the life and death of the fictional character, Ethel Cain. Those lyrics seemed to actualize in one’s mind as a movie, plot-driven and chronological. The sparse lyrics of Perverts find their payoff not in visualization, but in visceral reactions like anxiety or nausea, as if Cain has summoned bodily response.
… the progression of songs offers lulling variety, and the clear sonic thread makes the album feel less like a collection of songs and more like a singular, immersive experience.
Musically, Perverts builds on Cain’s knack for atmosphere but skews more industrial, more synthetic—less dive-bar bathroom stall, more abandoned church. “Onanist” pulses with warbling distortion, an undercurrent of static mirroring the album’s fixation on physicality, on the body as both site and symptom of destruction. Even in its quieter moments, like the aching strings of “Pulldrone,” there is a metallic aftertaste, as if every note is laced with rust. While Perverts has a cohesive sound, there seem to be two categories of songs on the album: hauntingly slow but structured songs and unrelentingly tense ambient tracks. Nevertheless, the progression of songs offers lulling variety, and the clear sonic thread makes the album feel less like a collection of songs and more like a singular, immersive experience.
Perhaps the album’s greatest triumph is its refusal to offer easy catharsis. There is no release here, no grand unraveling. The closing track fades out with more of the metallic static we’ve grown accustomed to in the previous eighty minutes of the EP. It is this bold sonic and thematic choice that makes Perverts so unapologetically polarizing. Lyrics dealing with shame and pain are not masked by the deceptively upbeat melodies as those of anti-pop hit “American Teenager,” which gained mainstream attention from TikTok users and a former U.S. President. After expanding her fan base while touring with established indie acts like Mitski and boygenius, Cain’s sophomore release seems to be fully hostile toward commercial music, and while it has certainly alienated sects of her fandom, it is a testament to Cain’s ethos and artistry.
If Preacher’s Daughter was a tragedy, Perverts is the messy, unglamorous act of survival. It is divine and depraved, profane and sacred. It is Ethel Cain at her most visceral.
