As demonstrated on her 2022 debut album, Preacher’s Daughter, Ethel Cain is a grand builder of worlds, conjuring up foreboding atmospheres that make it feel like you’re treading the same soil. Today, she’s back with a 90-minute project called Perverts.
Her latest turns away from the haunted pop of Preacher’s Daughter, reaching for drone, noise, slowcore, ambient, and spoken-word moments instead. But it’s just as laborious and harrowing, including four tracks that stretch beyond the 10-minute mark. It’s a demanding listen that lays her pain bare (“In the morning I will mar myself again…Shame is sharp, and my skin gives so easy,” Cain sings on the release’s lone single, “Punish”).
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Over the last year, Cain wrote, produced, and recorded the project between Coraopolis, Pennsylvania and Tallahassee, Florida, which includes a short essay called “The Consequence Of Audience.” “The cautionary tale is the fool’s errand, and I am no fool,” she writes. “I am as my hands are; twisting in on themselves and bursting at the seams. I cannot contain the ache for sensation, just as I could not contain the grief as I fell, nor the agony as I crawled my way back to this rocky countryside, and lo! I am on my way there again now.”
Stream her latest project Perverts below.