The restless buzzing of a neon light, the presence of a looming, moaning shadow in a dark corner, the crushing feeling of knowing you're about to be in terrible danger... Ethel Cain's long-awaited fourth album, Perverts, is a one and a half hour skin-crawling nightmare.
To match a nightmarish beginning to the new year, if you've ever had the misfortune of stumbling your way through TikTok at 3AM and come across the "backrooms" lore, that is exactly what Perverts feels like. It transports you to a liminal space where discomfort and looming fear are ever-present. A slap in the face to many of her fans, who expected an album with a similar vibe to her 2022 Preacher's Daughter, Perverts provides an incredibly uncomfortable experience to her listeners. The project consists of nine tracks, all of which never span below the six-minute mark, with her sermon song "Pulldrone" being the longest. The track is a 15 minute, 14 second narration of an otherworldly spiritual journey, akin to the one of Dante in the Divine Comedy, accompanied by grating sounds of discordant violins (mimicking the waxing and waning of the human life cycle).
Cain's singing voice, though hauntingly angelic, doesn't grace every song on the album, making the LP fall slightly flat for me, as I have always loved her lyricism paired with her beautiful siren-like voice and innate storytelling abilities. However, whatever little singing there is, the songs seem to invoke a heaviness of the heart. She narrates in her lead single "Punish".
In a mix of introspective, thoughtful lyrics on religious trauma, a desire to feel numb, death and sexual shame, distorted, terrifying background voices, and the feeling of having a ghost on your back, this track is one of the most innovative yet uncomfortable experiences I've gone through. In every track, Cain provides a new experience, a new perspective:
"I am punished by love / In the morning / I will mar myself again / (...) 'Shame is sharp / And my skin gives so easy' / God only knows / Only God would believe / That I was an angel / But they made me leave"
Cain recalls the recurrent theme of religious trauma, ever-present in many of her works. The title track of the album opens with a hauntingly grating and distorted version of "Nearer My God to Thee", priming its listeners for an experience of isolation––an exploration of what it feels like to leave your life behind. Through Perverts, this theme embodies itself in a new skin, evoking a feeling of isolation, as if you were looking at a shadow of yourself where the room around you is no longer a familiar and recognizable place.
Perverts is not a casual listen, with its long moments of uncomfortable silence and agitating soundscapes. It is almost an invitation to solemnly respect Cain's own vulnerability. The third track, "Housofpsychotiwomn," is a 13 minute long spiral into madness. The listener becomes trapped in their own mind-maze, with eerie, warbled vocals, expressing a morbid and cold feeling of love. The repetition of the phrase, "I love you," backed by terrifying humming sounds, as it climaxes into a terrifying distortion makes the message of the track obsessive.
"If you love me, keep it to yourself"
These are the lyrics that stood out the most, to me, from my favorite track of the album: "Vacillator". Cain's ethereal vocals come back into focus to reflect the mental conflict behind emotional indecision. Pertinent to the title, the lyrics reflect hesitation, uncertainty as it is accompanied by hypnotizing lyrics of unbridled sexual freedom. There is fear behind her words––of abandonment and of being shamed... there's an underlying desperation in her words.
"Onanist", "Etienne", "Pulldrone", and "Thatorchia" seem to be part of the same storyline. One of the things I half-heartedly have to discredit this album for is that after a while, the songs mesh together in a terrifying blend of noise, distorted radio voices that at times you can't exactly hear, and grating otherworldly buzzing and gasping sounds like a hellish preamble to the end of the album. "Amber Waves" is the relief after a night of incessant nightmares and sitting up soaked in sweat while trying to stabilize yourself.
"Um, how much should I take? / I would recommend that you take just as much as you need / To feel good"
By "relief" I don't mean that "Amber Waves"' vibe is any different from the songs before it, but much like "Vacillator", it temporarily lets go of the liminal space setting to let us take a breath and enjoy Cain's haunting yet hypnotizing, dulcet voice. The underlying theme of drug use to numb yourself from overwhelmingly dark feelings is present throughout the experience of listening to the album. It feels like the most adequate closing. Perverts ends with a resigned yet almost-content plea for the nightmare to be over: "I can't feel anything".
Cain makes up for the lack of vocal melodies in Perverts through her impressive work in storytelling and sound mixing nightmarish soundscapes, providing intentionality behind every note, sound, grating, and moaning noise. The album feels like a separation from the real world, it's like a sleep paralysis nightmare in which one can't do much but lay there as a victim to their mind's tortures.
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