Album Review : Ethel Cain - Perverts (2025)
The old saying that you shouldn't judge a book by its cover isn't always true. Sometimes, a work of art is so total that it can imbue the right feeling in its audience with one well-crafted image. I didn’t know who Ethel Cain was before seeing the cover for her new EP Perverts on Instagram two weeks ago, but her overall vibe immediately reminded me of perennial favorite of mine Chelsea Wolfe. So, I pressed play for the first time walking out of a screening of Nosferatu and, for a moment, everything was perfect.
Perverts is a whopping eighty-nine minutes long and features nine songs ranging from six to fifteen minutes long. If you're expecting a singer-songwriter type of deal, let me reframe your expectations right now: there is some drone, dark ambient and even hints of power electronics on Perverts. It has very little to do sonically with Ethel Cain's previous record Preacher's Daughter. Even when Cain actually sings, Perverts offer a muted, nightmarish landscape that has more to do with horror movies than pop.
It’s great. I’m glad someone had the courage to release something so different and committed to its creative paradigm in 2025.
Perverts starts with its twelve minutes title song, which sets the proper tone for what you’re about to experience. A dusty, surreal rendition of Nearer, My God, To Thee gives way after a minute to a minimalistic drone sounding like the hum of a moving car filtered through a phone Ethel Cain is reciting condemnations of "masturbators" to. The meditative drone is gradually layered with an array of dramatic and obsessive sounds capturing the dissonance of the message broadcasted. I love the dramatic synth at the end too.
Is this drone music? Is this dark ambient? Who cares? It’s an uncomfortable in-between and it's 100% original.
The follow-up Punish is a slow, disarticulated piano ballad featuring another recurring, obsessive sound that explodes into what I believe is a heavily distorted guitar riff halfway through. Ethel Cain repeats the haunting and heartbreaking chorus like a mantra "I am punished by love". There's an aura of corrupted beauty to Perverts that’s quite intoxicating. Of being hurt by something that should heal and being healed by something "that should hurt", which triggers powerful feelings of shame and isolation.
If you think Perverts would gradually build up to something more conventional, think again. Cain doubles down on the abstractness on the thirteen and a half minutes long Housofpsychoticwomn. Ghastly, digitally altered voices, thin strings (that I've been told are actually vibrators), pulsating samples, I love yous, otherworldly chants, this is a busy bumblebee of a drone track that highlights a confusion and a loss of identity better than any traditionally structured pop songs would.
Drone and dark ambient are historically two meditative and experimental music genres, but I love how emotional Ethel Cain made it. There's an untapped storytelling potential there.
As a counterpoint to the compulsive and disincarnate I-love-yous of Housofpsychoticwomn, Vacillator offers a minimalistic and heartbroken, reverb-drenched slowcore ballad about the mysteries of desire. "If you love me, keep it to yourself" Cain repeats over and over. Onanist tilts the balance of the record towards abstraction again with distorted piano (I love the way she digitally challenges the sacredness of analog instruments) and vaporous vocals that dig deeper into the overall theme of masturbation of the record.
At 15 minutes, Pulldrone is the longest and, by far, the most out there song on Perverts. The strings (or dildos, I don’t know) are the star of the show. They vibrate with such tension and unease. It evokes images of shame, psychological brittleness and fatality akin to what an Ari Aster movie can make you feel. Pulldrone packs so much emotional power by doing very little, but fully committing to it. Ethel Cain uses time and electronic distortion to alter your sense of reality, but also your sense of self.
Etienne is an almost instrumental number with a spoken word outro that features gorgeous bluegrass guitar buried under a shitload of reverb, time and dust. It’s a gorgeous and welcome respite between two bouts anxiety overdrive and low-key one of my favorite songs on the record. Thatorchia is a 100% instrumental drone song that layers ethereal vocalizing with electronic sounds and samples. It features some Sunn O)))-like guitar riffs that anchor perverts into a larger, richer tradition.
Bluegrass guitar returns on the closer Amber Waves. It’s one of the most conventional songs on Perverts along with Punish and somewhat of an emotional endpoint to such a metaphysical struggle of a record. It feels earned. The riffs have a rocking quality to them even if they have considerable power. It's a soft landing to such a hard and courageous record. I would call it bullshit if I wasn't so happy and relieved to hear it, but it's perhaps my least favorite song on Perverts. I don’t like nice things all that much.
*
I was not expecting such a powerhouse of a record this early in 2025. Especially from an artist I had never heard from before, but sweet-mother-of-everything, is this awesome or what? Perverts hit me like a set of brass knuckles on a cold, dark January evening. I love that what was essentially a pop artist went drone and dark ambient on her unsuspecting audience, exposing them to the most exquisite pleasures they didn’t even know existed. I love that Perverts exists and I love its content even more.
8.7/10
* Follow me on Instagram and Bluesky to keep up with new posts *
