An ode to the mechanical, and Jean Baudrillard's cameo
It is happening to me, actually: Ethel Cain's new EP has been haunting my every waking thought since I first listened to it.
Hello, happy 2025, and, how Slavoj would say, so on and so on. Forgive the swiftness with which I’m skipping over the pleasantries for the first post of the year, but I have been victim of an abduction perpetrated by none other than Ethel Cain’s new record, and I must evangelize everyone else at once.
First of all, I have to admit I am incredibly happy that Hayden decided not to continue with the Preacher’s Daughter trilogy right after the first installment. I believe this choice will help her fine tune the content for Preacher’s Wife and Mother of a Preacher (as per the current placeholder names) and, ironically — given the asphyxiating atmosphere of it —, I think Perverts is a breath of fresh air after such a character-heavy album.
While I couldn’t listen to it right on January 8th, I did listen after midnight and well into the AM hours. I recommend doing the same if you’re able to, as the setting helped evoke the paranoia-inducing and ominous feeling Perverts goes for. The side effect is that you might start feeling actually paranoid, but it’s a risk worth taking in my opinion.
With this work, Ethel is not trying to hide the truth: the EP is unsettling right off the bat, and the title track sets the mood for quite the long trip. Despite this, the wide array of mechanical noises has a potentially calming effect. There’s a devotion to drone music, and a masterful manipulation of it: in its pure machinery nature, it feels organic after Ethel’s touch. The references to “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream”, the short story by Harlan Ellison, also feel like a love letter to the industrial sounds in Perverts, with an AM-type of voice haunting the songs and a direct quote in “Pulldrone” left there as a treasure for us to find.1
The sounds of pain and pleasure mix continuously throughout the EP (from my notes, in “Punish” and “Housofpsychoticwomn”), as if to ask the listener if they’re not the same thing. This masochistic tinge intertwines itself with a horror atmosphere that, despite not being the main focus of the work nor Ethel’s intention, is there, jump scares included. Around the 9 minute mark in “Pulldrone” I had to turn off my bedside lamp to charge the phone, which left me with just a candle to light the room. I have never in my life been faster turning on my desk lamp.
The ambient project is accompanied by the “it is happening to everybody” motif that Ethel has been using to promote it. Perverts is trying to decipher what this thing is — not to name it, but to try and find the balance between its corrupting abilities and the help it provides in accessing some parts of ourselves locked up otherwise.
Destructive, apocalyptic guitars rupture the few melodic voices that can be found in tracks like “Punish” and “Onanist”. In this sense, the build up of “Thatorchia” towards the climax of the album (almost non-metaphorically, due to the eroticity of the record) is angelic, carrying the listener as both person and song soar. Perverts sucks you in, with a world-building so powerful that you can’t press pause without feeling like you’re destroying something in the process; and a very polished production, despite all the chaos and frenzy. Everything is unnerving, but calculated: nothing feels out of place.
And, of course, God is ever present once again. After all, we’re hoping to connect to a certain idea of Him — religious or secular — when reaching out for Ethel’s music. Yet in “Amber Waves”, someone else appears: “‘cause the devil I know, is the devil I want.” The lyrics perfectly encapsulate that aim in Perverts of chasing a higher plane of existence, enlightenment even, through whatever means necessary.
In the end, by virtue of perversion, there’s ascension, and with ascension comes the fall: “Only God knows, only God would believe / That I was an angel, but they made me leave.”
Until next time, with love,
M.