Perverts: Ethel Cain’s Creative Descent into Darkness

Upon her release of Preacher’s Daughter (2022), Ethel Cain established herself as both a powerful singer and a storyteller. The album delved into themes of religious trauma and familial rejection, following Cain’s journey as she became entangled with different lovers and drifted further from her community. With her latest album, Perverts (2025), Cain has remained committed to her distinctive take on the Southern Gothic genre in mainstream music. However, she has abandoned Indie Rock and her signature expansive narratives in favor of something more eerily experimental and introspective. This unprecedented shift in style, which may signal a lasting transformation in her music, prioritizes using music to recreate an atmosphere of fear and shame surrounding sexuality, especially within the Christian faith. While sound effects may be nothing new to the music industry, Cain’s bold application of ambience and auditory manipulation to her stories heightens the impact of her messages in a way that other mainstream artists have yet to take advantage of.

“Perverts,” the title track, immediately establishes the dark atmosphere that pervades the album. Beginning with a 19th century funeral hymn, “Nearer, My God, to Thee,” Cain introduces her motifs of religion and the expectations of heaven through a cacophony of distorted singing, which slowly drones out until all that remains is ambient white noise. For fans following her recent ambience project on SoundCloud, this change feels like an inevitable evolution of Cain’s production rather than a surprise. Cain’s use of prose over traditional lyricism, combined with the lack of conventional instrumentation, makes for a chilling 12-minute auditory experience reminiscent of an analog horror short. By removing all extravagance from her music, Cain draws the listener into her world of perversion for a more vivid experience. This is perpetuated by the official visualizer of the album, consisting entirely of black-and-white powerlines found in otherwise rural areas. This symbolism of the intrusion of modernity into the natural world suggests the definition of pervert that Cain is leaning towards with this album: the distortion and corruption of something towards a darker path.

Beyond its ambient soundscape, the true impact of “Perverts” emerges in occasional vocal interjections of the phrases “heaven,” “masturbator,” and “heaven has forsaken the masturbator.” These cut-ins unveil the sentiments of shame and ostracization that surround sexuality within the church. Ethel further embraces this with “Punish”—one of the few songs in this album where she fully utilizes her powerful voice. Cain describes her experience of sexual gratification feeling “like lead, poisonous and heavy,” as if she is “punished by love,” especially after being cast out by the Church for her sins. These lines evoke the tension between desire and guilt, giving shape to the repression Cain struggles with.

Cain’s experience growing up in the Southern Baptist faith, along with her long standing connection with God, adds that much more weight and authenticity to her confrontation of the complex relationship between love, sexuality, and shame. With “Vacillator,” love is a battleground, something Cain simultaneously desires and resists; she is torn between wanting to be kept out in preservation of her faith and let in. Meanwhile, “Housofpsychoticwomn” explores what love means to her, and how its absence from her life has left her feeling inexplicably empty and incapable of understanding herself, even at her current age. However, her repression leads to a distorted view of love. Though Cain considers it a wondrous and magnificent ideal, her repetition of “I love you” progressively melts into something more akin to obsession and toxicity, representing how institutions can pervert love until it turns into hate. 

This album’s unsettling ambience only amplifies this emotional distortion, as almost every track is underlain by faint buzzing, creaking, and ethereal resonance. Whereas lyrics may take up two to five minutes of a track, pure noise will occupy the rest, often anywhere from nine minutes to the entire song. This is most notable in “Pulldrone,” in which Cain outlines her journey with love as though it were a religious experience, speaking over the chiming of bells and electrical whirring as she lists the stages. She begins with apathy towards the feeling before it progresses into curiosity, then assimilation, declaring her conviction to “dislocate [her] jaw” to fit all of love’s beauty inside her. As love turns to hate and isolates her from her religion, Cain descends into resentment, ultimately ending in desolation as she swears to “claw [her] way back to the great dark” and “not speak of this place again.” 

Cain wrote an essay in 2024 about the importance of true engagement with a work of art rather than skimming the surface for something more humorous or digestible. With Perverts, Cain eliminates all opportunities for listeners to diminish the seriousness of her music, emphasizing the barebones of her message with off-putting prose and haunting ambient noise. The album’s dissonance and abstraction cements it as the antithesis of Cain’s old work, challenging listeners to engage with its themes on a deeper, more introspective level. Rather than offering access to its meaning, Perverts demands patience and contemplation as it explores the bleakness and numbness of Cain’s community. 

The album is undoubtedly an experience, but it’s not something a typical listener could casually sit through twice. It was a little disappointing to miss out on what Cain is best known for: her strong vocals and elaborate storytelling. She gives us a taste of her typical style in “Punish” and “Amber Waves,” but otherwise leaves Perverts devoid of it entirely. Regardless of personal preference, however, one cannot deny the audacity or the depth of Cain’s artistic vision. Through Perverts, Cain is finally given a chance to explore and share with her fanbase her longtime passion for ambient sound production, and her innovation may hopefully inspire other artists to embrace their own musical niches as well.