Drone music, in all its timeless forms, can be a great comfort. It would be natural to view Perverts, the daring follow-up to Ethel Cain’s 2022 breakout Preacher’s Daughter, as a response to, and rejection of, everything about success that might register as noise, not least because it was accompanied by a Tumblr post entitled ‘The Consequence of Audience’. Preacher’s Daughter amassed a fervent following, and Perverts no doubt poses a challenge to the segment of Cain’s audience that has trouble engaging with the artist’s persona in the absence of unambiguous lore and soaring melodies. Yet the 90-minute project – promotional materials variously refer to it as a “body of work” or even an “EP,” so yes, technically not an album – does not feel like a departure so much as an opportunity for Hayden Anhedönia to home in on the esoteric darkness she holds a deep reverence for, the eerie dissonance and muffled silences that were seen tangential rather than core to her songwriting. More than just provocative, it is an ode to the drone music that reverberates and thrives everywhere and every day, that has naturally followed her down the side of the highway, her favorite field, her home studio: “I love you, sound, you have always been there for me,” she wrote in another post.
Like its predecessor, Perverts digs into religious shame, sexual violence, and irrepressible desire, but it remains thematically impenetrable in part because it requires you, in turn, to be there for it. If Preacher’s Daughter was the first in a planned trilogy about three generations of a family, this is a wilful diversion from the “Ethel Cain universe,” a record where the narrative is inconsequential and the music secondary to sound – one reason why it probably disqualifies as an album. (“But I will not tell you the visceral details, as you already know them,” Cain’s short story reads, “You all do. It’s happening to every-body.”) That’s not to say the music it collects is discountable – from the dark ambient pieces to the more conventional, by Cain’s standards, songs, it is towering both in its claustrophobia and gravitational pull. Originally conceived as a record about different kinds of deviants, some of those perspectives have made it through, but sink into the background. Without the cast of characters Preacher’s Daughter was eager to properly introduce, the horror Cain drawls out gradually blurs into your own.
Catharsis, previously a touchstone of Cain’s music, offers no path out here. Instead, Perverts often treasures (self-)disintegration. ‘Houseofpyschoticwomn’, which takes its name from Kier-La Janisse’s seminal book examining the portrayal of mentally ill women in horror films, beats the refrain of “I love you” into the ground, distorting its purity as Cain does her own voice; ‘Pulldrone’, the longest track on the record at 15:14, delivers its treatise over an actual hurdy gurdy, which continues its ominous hum for ten full minutes after the language runs dry. The atmosphere does shift on the last two instrumental tracks, the first of which, ‘Etienne’, lets air, dust, and melody into its wide expanse of acoustic guitar and lo-fi piano. ‘Thatorchia’, whose title alludes to the album’s twin themes of death and masturbation – as part of her NTS Radio show, she defined the word as “the bitter acceptance of the knowledge that god will let you near but he won’t let you stay” – ushers in a wall of electric guitar that’s the closest Perverts comes to a kind of apotheosis.
Save for ‘Punish’, the harrowing lead single that remains a standout as the second track on the album, the rest of the tracks that feature Cain’s singing voice seem, at first, to offer solace. But the pillowy vocals and Matthew Tomasi’s minimal drumming on ‘Vacillator’ suggest not freedom but a glistening numbness, curiously contradicting the exasperating love that precedes it: “If you love me, keep it to yourself.” The softness, the shame it beckons, is more punishing than anything. But closer ‘Amber Waves’, which features Midwife’s Madeline Johnston on guitar and Vyva Melinkolya’s Angel Diaz on lap steel and electric piano, coasts on the melancholy of succumbing to a love marked by toxic cycles, but also absence, an empty space the narrator can comfortably, even ecstatically, dissolve into. It is the most delicately beautiful song on the album, even if it provides no real escape. “I will dislocate my jaw to fit it all in,” Cain intones on ‘Pulldrone’ – the torture, the beauty, the darkness, all of it. If you’re scared to let so much as a shiver crawl through your body, that’s your loss.