Album Review: Ethel Cain, Perverts

Dial back to Ethel Cain’s debut album Preacher’s Daughter, and you’ll hear faint flickers of the ambient material she’s now fully exploring on Perverts. Around the edges of the widescreen shots of American life lurked a deep, often disconcerting horror.

Sure, the indie artist may have swung for the fences with the open snare and pearlescent riffage of ‘American Teenager’, but she also growled against a loop of buzzing flies on ‘Ptolemaea’. Her second LP magnifies the darkness underpinning her southern gothic aesthetic.

The title-track opens with a warped take on the hymn ‘Nearer My God To Thee’, before any sense of light dies off. What follows is a 12-minute drone, with death-knell synths and striking lyrics: “Heaven has forsaken the masturbator / It’s happening to everybody.”

Wrapped in guitar fuzz and eroded keys, second track ‘Punish’ offers the closest reminder of Cain’s previous sound, with pop-adjacent melodies that quickly devolve into a wall of distortion.

Taking a page from Flannery O’Connor’s book, Cain’s ‘Christ-haunted’ vocals spread doom far and wide as she plainly sings “I am punished by love.”

As it stands, Perverts may very well be the album that takes Ethel Cain away from the imprecise pop image she’s held all along. A wonderful effort.

8/10