Ethel Cain's Perverts feels like a descent into a dark, distorted landscape where beauty and decay collide. This album is a grim, immersive experience—an unsettling, atmospheric reflection of trauma and longing. If her previous album, Preacher's Daughter, was a story told in conventional song structures, Perverts strips away any narrative clarity, favoring abstraction in both sound and lyrics. Where Preacher's Daughter was a novel, Perverts is a haunting, shapeless poem.
Musically, the album combines the grimness of doom drone, the dissonance of industrial noise, and the subtlety of ambient electronics, with moments that recall The Sweet Hereafter's ethereal folk and Merzbow’s caustic feedback. Ghoulish, treated pianos play out like ghostly lullabies, while eerie reverberated vocals echo through cavernous space, as if they are haunted by their own sorrow. This is a record that refuses the constraints of pop song structure, a true act of artistic rebellion. With its creepy, processed guitars and atmosphere thick with tension, Perverts feels like a musical exploration of the grotesque, the ugly, and the demented side of Americana.
Perverts weaves a strikingly eerie tapestry, where traces of pop are warped and distorted by avant-garde noise. Imagine Taylor Swift's introspective melodies defiled and reassembled by the dissonant chaos of Nurse With Wounds. Some tracks echo the fragile intimacy of Molly Drake's piano work, only to be consumed by the unsettling hum of Eraserhead’s industrial soundscape, where beauty is swallowed whole by a sense of dread. A transgressive, nightmarish reimagining of the familiar, where vulnerability and unease coexist in a tension that’s impossible to shake.
Tracks stretch on for uncomfortable lengths, embracing the slow-burn, dragging out their despair into unsettling territories. The album pulls you into its world, but it’s not an easy place to be. It’s a harrowing listen, a deep, uncomfortable dive into repressed trauma, with some moments so immersive that they feel almost suffocating. If you’re looking for comfort, Perverts is not it; this is an industrial gothic folk record that takes the raw essence of emotional pain and stretches it into something distorted and foreign. This is the sound of an artist with nothing to lose, no fucks to give, and a vision that’s terrifyingly unrelenting.
Genre: Avant-Garde
Release date: January 8th, 2025
Produced by: Ethel Cain
Label: AWAL
Rating: 8/10
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