Ethel Cain's Perverts is less a continuation of Preacher's Daughter than a dismantling of the expectations that album created. Where its predecessor used recognisable songs to sustain a narrative, this record treats duration, repetition and texture as its principal materials. Melody remains, but often at a distance, half-buried beneath drone, feedback, treated piano and vast fields of reverberation.
The result can be beautiful, though rarely comfortable. Pieces such as "Pulldrone" and "Housofpsychoticwomn" stretch well beyond conventional song length, allowing small changes in frequency or vocal texture to acquire disproportionate weight. Elsewhere, the piano and voice suggest a damaged version of parlour music or folk song before electronics erode the familiar shapes. The contrast is crucial: Cain does not abandon melody so much as repeatedly expose it to decay.
That process gives Perverts its peculiar relationship with Americana. The record retains traces of hymn, ballad and domestic piano music, but they appear inside an environment closer to doom drone, industrial noise and ambient composition. "Vacillator," "Etienne" and "Amber Waves" allow those worlds to overlap without ever resolving the tension between them. At times the atmosphere recalls the oppressive machinery of Eraserhead; at others, the fragility of the piano playing makes the surrounding noise seem even more hostile.
The album's length is demanding by design, and there are passages where immersion tips into inertia. Yet compression would also change the nature of the work. These pieces need enough time for repetition to become disorienting and for sounds that initially register as background to move gradually into the foreground.
Perverts is therefore at its strongest when beauty and abrasion become impossible to separate. A piano figure emerges, a voice seems briefly close enough to touch, and then the room around it fills with hum, distortion and empty space. Cain has replaced the narrative architecture of Preacher's Daughter with something less stable: music in which the disappearance of a song can be as important as the song itself.
GENRE: Avant-Garde
RELEASE DATE: January 8, 2025
PRODUCED BY: Ethel Cain
LABEL: Daughters of Cain Records
RATING: 8/10