Ethel Cain always pushes the boundaries… but is the new album worth a listen?

Abandon all expectations and enter this experience she’s paved without any distractions, because one thing about Ethel is…she’s gonna go there.

Ethel Cain’s recording titled Perverts consists of nine tracks; however, it is not short and sweet; its runtime coming in at almost an hour and a half.

Cain is known for her lengthy tracks, so that wasn’t a shocker to me going in. But starting off the project with a 12 minute song was bold, especially since that’s not even the longest one on the album. Track 6, “Pulldrone,” takes that crown, lasting for 15 minutes and 14 seconds.

I gotta say, Cain really had me at the beginning of this work. I was invested; curious. But it was a little after halfway when she started to lose me.

The first and titular track, “Perverts,” begins with a hymn purposefully made to sound distorted, soon after followed by speech influenced by the same effect. However, the words sounded so blurry that I couldn’t understand what was being said. Initially, I was going to use the word “spooky” to describe this trip down the rabbit hole that she’s dug, but it is genuinely scary and ominous. And I feel that this was Cain’s intention. She crafts a space of ethereal, ambient nothingness, and then drops in random tones of sound out of nowhere (aka jumpscares for me).

When she finally sings in Track 2, “Punish,” the first word that came to mind when I heard her voice was “angelic.” Truly, she offers such unmatched depth to “Alternative” as a genre.

It was amidst Track 6, “Pulldrone,” when I fell off. The strings started to sound like a chainsaw because we were hanging onto the notes for so long, and I started to run out of steam. I finally felt like I got pulled up for air throughout Track 8, “Thatorchia,” when she graced us with her vocals once again. And luckily, she sang more on the final track, as well, titled “Amber Waves.” She is so talented; her sound magical. This song especially was breathtaking and so, so beautiful. I wanted more of her vocally on this project as a whole.

Something I wasn’t a huge fan of though was the repeated use of muffled voices in the background of at least a third of the tracks. I could barely make out what they were saying, and that took me out of the experience. Performatively: brilliant. Logistically…slightly frustrating. And there aren’t any official lyric videos on her YouTube channel that could accompany my listening journey. (The closest thing we get is in the description of each song’s “Visualizer” video; the lyrics, both those sung and spoken, are typed out there.) This artistic choice definitely helped concoct a semi-frightening atmosphere, though. I need her to compose the score and soundtrack for a horror film. Like…this is 100% Nosferatu-coded.

Overall, Perverts felt like a New Age/Ambient soundtrack with elements of slam poetry sprinkled into it.

I know that she had such a clear vision for this album. I can feel it. This woman crafts masterpieces that are truly worthy of the title “art.” I mean I was locked in for her album Preacher’s Daughter that came out in May 2022. That was the first thing of hers I ever listened to, and WOW – what a treat it is. But WHAT was going on here? I do want to know! Maybe I need to do a deep dive into her Instagram. I just wish that her concept was more clearly laid out.

I liked having to Google the definitions of almost each one of the song titles. Seriously, I learned some new things (like what it means to be a vacillator), but the work was almost so eerie that I couldn’t quite see through the fog. I picked up (maybe) a fallen angel motif in “Pulldrone,” a comment about heaven in “Perverts” and how something is “happening to everybody,” and then perhaps a reference to some form of heartbreak in “Amber Waves?” We hear a conversation between two people at the beginning of that track where a womxn asks a man how much medication she should take, and he answers with, “I would recommend that you take just as much as you need to feel good.” And then at the very end, we hear her reply, “I can’t feel anything.”

And something else I know about Ethel is that she is gonna give us a damn-good callout of the Christian religion! I know that was somewhere in here!! But where?? I was just too lost in the sauce to detect it. 🙁

I’m looking forward to her upcoming album Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You being released in August of this year. (Check out her official website here for more.) Hopefully that’ll shine some more light on this project, since much of Cain’s discography, if not all of it, is made up of concept works surrounding the same character and topics.

One thing’s for sure: do not listen to this while operating a motor vehicle.

Rating: 3 spooks out of 5