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Only a week into 2025, Ethel Cain has launched a novel and difficult album.
“Perverts,” the second studio launch by the gloomy Americana artist Hayden Anhedönia, who performs as Ethel Cain, deploys an enormous array of components. Put up-industrial noise, glacial tempos, layered reverb and ritualistic incantations by darkly angelic vocals mix in a jarring exploration of self-gratification and self-loathing.
The artist’s first full-length launch, 2022’s “Preacher’s Daughter,” blended folks, goth and ambient components. Cain’s ethereal vocals spun a narrative of violence, trauma, and Southern-Baptist confession. “Perverts” enters because the second installment of a deliberate trilogy and tells a postmodern horror story by its formidable sound. The place “Preacher’s Daughter” tiptoed into brutalist musical margins, “Perverts” is aggressively experimental, that includes poetry-slam fashion exposition, lengthy intervals of droning and empty air.
Cain produces and performs quite a lot of devices on “Perverts,” together with the unusual, bowed-stringed hurdy gurdy. Multi-instrumentalists Matthew Tomasi of the band 9million, who additionally collaborated on “Preacher’s Daughter,” and the lo-fi artist Angel Diaz, each make restricted however impactful contributions to a soundscape that evokes intense isolation.
Discovering affect in ambient music and the sub-genre slowcore, a lot of “Perverts” can sound unstructured the primary time by. A deeper pay attention by its 90-minute run time reveals meticulous composition, with the musical components purposefully slowed and distorted. In sound as in lyrics, the listener is left to seek out sample and that means in its sparseness.
The title monitor opens the album and units the desk for the journey inside. It begins with a warbly recording of “Nearer, My God, to Thee,” the hymn that the Titanic band performed because the ship sank to its doom in James Cameron’s 1997 movie. Almost 40 seconds of lifeless air observe, earlier than Cain speaks and repeats the road, “heaven has forsaken the masturbator.” Reverberations intensify all through.
The metallic “Punish,” which follows, is without doubt one of the extra accessible songs. A easy 4-chord piano development runs the length. Cain delivers the lyrics in ghostly, lullaby vocals. As she sings “I’m punished by love,” a grinding electrical guitar engulfs the piano and vocals.
In Cain’s universe, pleasure at all times ends in ache. Like in “Vacillator,” the place she sings: “Should you love me / preserve it to your self.”
Cain has made an attention-grabbing alternative in presenting such a tough and surprising sophomore launch. “Preacher’s Daughter” drew extensive vital acclaim — no less than partially as a consequence of its single anti-pop hit, “American Teenager” — and Cain expanded her fanbase by touring with beloved acts just like the indie artist Mitski and the Grammy Award-winning boygenius. “Perverts” is certain to alienate a few of her viewers, however as a creative assertion of uncompromising experimentation, its legacy could also be to increase concepts of musical boundaries.
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