Ethel Cain’s “Perverts” explores perversion, vice, and a new meaning to simulacrum.

By Natalie Pereria

Explicit Content Warning

Photo via @mothercain on instagram

Album Score: 8.5/10

Ethel Cain is a familiar name to many internet users – whether from her TikTok viral tracks, such as “Strangers” and “American Teenager” or from her recent appearance on Fox News due to her statements on CEOs over on her Instagram. However, it’s her recent EP that seems to be dividing fans as newer ones seem to question what exactly they are listening to.

Hayden Anhedonia – Cain’s real name – has created the persona of Ethel Cain to share her music, including the well-known album “Preacher’s Daughter”. This album is Anhedonia’s debut album and follows the devastating story of the character of Ethel Cain as she struggles with drug use, abuse from the men who surround her, and eventually, her death. It is a heavy and hard-hitting record that follows themes around social religious trauma and the long term effects that taking advantage of these religious beliefs can have on people. Anhedonia originally planned to make all her longer records connected to this story, such as a B-sides EP she is planning to further the story of Ethel Cain, along with two albums that will accompany the story and tell the cycle of familial trauma that led us to this point. However, instead, Anhedonia shocked fans by announcing “Perverts” last November, along with the lead track “Punish”. 

What is”Perverts”  about? 

When “Perverts” first released, many fans seemed divided. Fans who were familiar with Anhedonia’s work and the statement’s she’s made explaining the project over on her Tumblr found themselves entranced by her storytelling abilities and her ability to create haunting sounds and textures within her music. Fans who weren’t as familiar found themselves confused by the lack of context – was the album supposed to be related to Ethel Cain? Is this supposed to be part of Cain’s anthology story?

While it may not seem so, “Perverts” is in a way connected to the story of Cain. The theme and tagline for “Perverts” has pervaded all areas of Anhedonia’s social media and is even referenced in the title track of the EP –  “it’s happening to every-body.” The themes she refers to within “Perverts” pervade all people in one way or another, so there are ways to see these themes reflected within her previous work. However, that’s not what she is intending to show.

Rather, the idea of “it’s happening to every-body” refers to the philosophy of simulacrum that Anhedonia has developed. Simulacra is the idea that something replaces reality with its representation. A common example is, if you were to make a for-scale map of a park and laid the map on top of the park, overtime the map would begin to fade and become one with the park, leaving the original reality gone and only, in technical terms, a generation loss of what was originally there and replicated. Following twelve steps, Anhedonia’s simulacrum refers to the way people use their own perversions, whether they be emotional, sexual, or drug related – the main ones she refers to within Perverts – to feel closer to God. However, as they fall through this cycle, they end up at the twelfth stage: desolation. In Anhedonia’s theory, she details the cycle people go through as they attempt to become closer to whatever they consider holy and divine, only to pervert their own reality and be met with the devastating realization that they can never be one with God – a term she has coined “Thatorchia”. They lose all concept of what they originally held divine as their reality goes further through this cycle of perversion. ”Perverts” follows these ideas – swapping between stories of people giving into their own perversions and even songs that detail people who have fallen into the stage of desolation. The concept is cyclical as well, with the album being focused with imagery of rings, circles, Ouroboros, and Étienne-Louis Boullée’s Cénotaphe, there is this consistent imagery of death and rebirth. As one perversion fails to deliver the feeling of proximity to God and desolation is found, a new, more perverse vice can be found and the cycle can once again continue. It is a balancing act between allowing one to be a part of the cycle and keeping one from getting swept up in it - a balance that Anhedonia herself admits not knowing where it lies.

Another aspect of the album that has been a shock to more casual fans is the difference in style. While Anhedonia has released ambient songs before, such as the tracks “August Underground” and “Televangelism” from “Preacher’s Daughter”, these tracks followed a much more standard instrumental form that audiences were familiar with. However, the tracks on Perverts more heavily utilize droning music. It is not a genre most mainstream audiences would often catch themselves listening to, however any horror film fan has heard these sounds filling up eerie film scenes or providing ambience for stressful and scary moments. However, there is a strong and unique beauty in an album centered on concepts of perverting reality being filled with drone music. The beauty is found in how this style of music allows for its own personal interpretations when there’s no specific visuals they are supposed to be aiding. The music allows for its own audience interpretation and feeling as a response – something Anhedonia mentioned on tumblr as being an important piece of the album.

Track Breakdown

“Perverts”

The album begins with Anhedonia’s grainy rendition of “Nearer, My God, To Thee”, sounding as though played on an old cassette, Anhedonia’s favorite hymn and a memory of how she heard it working in her church’s library in the summer as a kid. It soon delves into these soft swirling wind sounds, as Anhedonia begins to repeat segments of one phrase: “Heaven has forsaken the masturbator.” When asked about the line and the repeated phrase, Anhedonia said via tumblr: “there’s no condemnation or mockery or bias on perverts anywhere. I like objective portrayals. That way you can decide how you feel about it. Do you feel shame in your pleasure or do you revel in it. Do you know the line between right and wrong and do you know what side of it you’re on?” The song allows the audience to look into their own lives, their own shame, all while being accompanied by a few notes occasionally that break through the consistent drone, each note ringing out often discordantly to intensify the unsettling feeling of falling into this path Anhedonia is describing. There’s two other lines spoken in the song to add to this feeling: “No one you know is a good person” and “fast, reckless driving often leads to slow, sad music.” The first line emphasizes the point Anhedonia makes about the lack of condemnation or bias; she isn’t trying to condemn all people, rather stating that any person can do bad things and some acts can be twisted enough to be bad. Not to mention, this overwhelming concept throughout the album that as a singular person, no one will ever understand the exact meaning and behavior’s behind another person’s actions. The second line describes the simulacrum that Anhedonia describes, the idea that indulging in thrills to feel closer to God too often will only lead to desolation, the final step she describes in her theory of simulacrum. As the music grows louder through the end of the song, it cuts off suddenly and the song leaves us with a garbled version of Anhedonia’s voice as she repeats the tagline that has been accompanying the album since it was announced: “it’s happening to everybody”. Whether someone is aware of it or not, everyone has something in their lives that gives them this feeling of proximity to God. It is a balancing act between perversion and indulgence versus mundaneness and what Anhedonia calls “pulldrone” - a word she uses to describe the constant drone of everyday life that can cause people to lean heavier into their perversions. If they’re not careful, they risk overindulging themselves and falling into the circle of simulacrum, a heavy theme Anhedonia touches on later in the record.

“Punish”

The single track, “Punish”, was originally released in November of 2024. The track is accompanied by beautifully soft piano and Anhedonia’s haunting vocals. Many of the ambient sounds in the track are entirely organic, recorded on Anhedonia’s phone, to give the song the feeling of being “up-close and personal, almost inappropriate.” She certainly achieves this. The song is almost eerily quiet, and her vocals are airy and soft, as if being sung directly into the listener’s ear. The song is one of the only tracks that remains from what the album was originally going to be. In a tumblr Q’n’A, Anhedonia states:

“The [original] concept for ‘Perverts’ was a character study about different ‘perverts’, inspired by reading Knockemstiff. A sex addict, a pedophile, an arsonist, a sedative addict, etc. The project is completely different now, but ‘Punish’ and ‘Amber Waves’ are the only surviving demos from it so they’re still about that. ‘Punish ' is about a pedophile who was shot by the child’s father and now lives in exile where he physically maims himself to stimulate the bullet wound in order to punish himself.” 

Through this song, we see a lot of the themes throughout “Perverts” as it relates to shame and perverse indulgence. Anhedonia has never strayed from telling a story others would not even try to, and this song reflects that well. She takes on the perspective of the pedophile within the song with laments about being punished by love, as well as the absolutely haunting line “Only god knows, only god would believe / that I was an angel, but they made me leave.” Through the theming of the album, it is clear to see that the speaker was giving into perversions to feed into the feeling of proximity to God, and as a result, the speaker feels no shame about the actual perversion and rather feels punished. As Anhedonia delivers this line, the song evolves from the softer sound it started with as these stronger and heavier guitar chords resonate, all while repeating vocalizations and the line “I am punished by love.” The strength of the new sound, as well as the resulting drop-off towards the final moments of the song back into the softer sound, allow the audience to be witness to the speaker’s new perversion and the feeling of that proximity to God as the speaker has begun to use the shame of getting caught and the euphoric feeling found in self-mutilation in combination to feel that closeness.

“Housofpsychoticwomn”

“Housofpsychoticwomn" is one of the longer tracks on the album, coming in at just over thirteen minutes. Many people describe the album overall as feeling eerie and almost scary, and this song is one of the strongest deliverances of that feeling. Titled after a book of the same name, the track has this consistently repeated “I love you” throughout the song that simultaneously feels muffled and too close, as if being whispered towards the listener through sheets. There is this strong swirling sound coming in over the consistent drone of the song that is almost disorienting to listen to. 

Beneath the whispered “I love you”s, there’s more spoken lines, softer and hard to hear at times. It is an almost literal portrayal of each “I love you” holding more weight than the simplicity of the words alone. In the spoken words, each one distorted and blending in with the underlying drone of the song, the speaker describes something that loved them being taken from them and waiting for it to come back, before describing the beauty and pain of love. There is a clear obsession within the speaker about this type of love they may never have once again. The speaker also contradicts themselves strongly, saying at one point “Do you think you understand what it means to be loved? You don’t, and you never will,” before later saying, “When you were young, you said you wished that someone loved you. I do.” The words and sounds in the song continue to feel more and more distorted, as if obsession is twisting the entire thing at once. There’s a clear age and power imbalance between the speaker and their audience, noted by the speaker’s insistence that they understand and have felt love before while their audience hasn’t. 

To me, there is an almost parental feel to the words, as if being spoken by a parent using an incestual relationship with a child to make up for their spouse being lost. It’s an incredibly dark theme, however it would not be new to Anhedonia, whose second EP under the Ethel Cain name goes by the name of “Inbred" and hauntingly touches on many of these ideas. It would also match the overwhelming obsessive feeling throughout the song, as if using this obsessive love not only to feel that proximity to God, but also to make up for their spouse leaving them and the love and obsession they felt for the spouse. In a more simpler case, the lost love could relate to the feeling the obsessive love used to give them within the Divine Theater, that they no longer feel is as strong, adding to the intense nature of their love.

As the music gets louder, so do the vocalizations and the otherwise eerie nature of the song, soft breaths and distorted moaned notes becoming distorted into the swirling sound of the song. In the center of it, the repeated “I love you”s lie, making them central to all of the overwhelming noise, until eventually, they too begin to be swept up into the sound. Then, a moment of brief pause, leaving only the soft background drones and similar noises, before an intense hum takes over the sound, and each “I love you” feels even closer than before, as if the sheets muffling the sound have been ripped away. When I first listened to this track, this moment immediately stuck out to me as an intensification of feelings, and almost begging the listener to not leave them like their original love had done. Compared to other tracks that use a growing loudness and intensity to simulate the ring and proximity to God, this track uses the moment of quiet to cut through the sound and allow the breath to be felt before returning us to the world. Unlike “Punish”, where the intensity holds strong until the end of the song, this moment is comparatively shorter, especially when compared to the track length, which can allude to why the speaker might seem so desperate in the final moments of the track, as if they are afraid of losing their access to reprieve from the drone of life. It is an eerie and haunting track that makes the listener feel at times pinned to their seat, and in some cases, even afraid of the speaker’s obsession throughout the song.

“Vacillator”

Ethel Cain - Vacillator (Official Video)

Compared to the overwhelming “I love you”s in the previous track, this song also has an antithetical line repeated: “If you love me, keep it to yourself.” A vacillator describes a person who is indecisive or hesitant to things, and for love, can be a person who is incredibly inconsistent emotionally, flocking from sweet and loving to cold and distant. This track is an easy display of that, flocking from this overwhelming sensuality and sexual lines, while also telling the listener to keep their love to themselves. 

To fans of Anhedonia’s previous work, many of the themes actually align with the song “Gibson Girl", a track in which sex and drugs are being used to manipulate the titular character. This is furthered by the fact that while performing “Gibson Girl” on the Childish Behavior tour during summer of 2024, the visuals that played in the background of Anhedonia’s performance are actually from the music video to this track, that at the time, the audience did not even know existed. The song’s theming is pretty clear in how it fits into the rest of the album. The speaker is utilizing sexual relationships to feel closer to God, while wanting none of the actual romantic involvements. It’s unclear how much agency the speaker has in these sexual relationships, as at the beginning of the song, the speaker states, “if you want, you can bite me / and I won’t move,” however, there is still this connection and closeness to God being found through it. That moment for this track comes between telling the listener to “let me in” and the repeated lines of “if you love me, keep it to yourself.” The moment is a break from the usual sound of the track, punctuated by breathy moans fading into the background noise. This song is a bit closer to a more standard song, but that takes away none of the beauty of the track nor does it lose any of its emphasis in how it fits within the theming of the album.

“Onanist”

This track is primarily instrumental, and while the original idea to the song was about a pair of arsonists who were twin sisters, Anhedonia said that the song experienced a lot of changes before ending up where it is now. The title itself refers to a biblical story and names the speaker a masturbator. The beginning lines of the track reference Dante’s Divine Comedy, where at the beginning Dante describes the crossroads of life one might find themselves in, and where they have to choose between pursuing heavenly virtue or giving in to damning temptation. Her voice is airy and almost siren-like, as if pulling the speaker towards their own damnation. The title of the track as well as the lines that come rather quickly of “I want to know love / I want to know what it feels like” gives clear insight to the speaker’s choice. When this choice is made, the soft piano dissolves into these much heavier, almost mechanical sounds, with soft vocalizations coming through behind it in a juxtaposing manner. The song begins to get overwhelming in these mechanical sounds until the speaker is not heard at all, until the sound breaks, and the speaker begins to repeat the line “it feels good” as if pleading their case to explain their fall into this temptation. The sounds making up the atmospheric nature of the song switch from their earlier piano to now thunder, and this layered vocalizations and groans, as if mimicking the sounds Dante used to describe Hell and Purgatory. The song ends with the simple phrase “it feels”, and it feels almost as though the speaker is horrified by themself, by the action starting to feel monotonous in itself and no longer making them feel that strong proximity to God anymore.

“Pulldrone”

“Pulldrone” is the longest track on the album, coming in at around fifteen minutes long, and the beginning of the track describes the twelve steps of simulacrum as Anhedonia envisions it. Baudrillard’s simulacrum was a huge inspiration for the entirety of Perverts, and here Anhedonia gives herself the space to explain how she has come to envision simulacra in her view of the world and how it has changed. Sound is used very deliberately throughout this track, mimicking the steps and the feelings they can give. There’s a soft drone in the background as she begins to speak. When she reaches step six, delineation, when one becomes flush against the veil separating mortal people from God and holiness, a singing bowl is played to feed into the beauty of the moment. However, as the steps continue, the sound of the singing bowl begins to fade and mesh into a hurdy gurdy slowly beginning to play. The sound of the hurdy gurdy slowly grows louder, and the singing bowl chimes once more as Anhedonia repeats the word hate in step eight, resentment. During this step, she quotes the famous short story “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream” by Harlan Ellison, a short story with similar themes about an AI named AM wishing to be human and falling down a similarly destructive path of simulacrum as Anhedonia describes people go through as they try to be one with God. 

The final step, desolation, the two sounds of the hurdy gurdy and the singing bowl mix together fully as Anhedonia speaks to the themes, nature, and visuals of the album, “Therein lies sacred geometry of Onanism, of Ouroboros, of punishment. I am that I was as I no longer am for I am nothing.” The final spoken word is “Amen” before the sound becomes enveloped with the hurdy gurdy for the remainder of the track, strong and almost overwhelming to listen to as the audience is left in the twelfth step of the cycle of desolation. The song continues with the hurdy gurdy, with the singing bowl chiming occasionally and almost needing to battle to be heard. Eventually, the sound slowly begins to break apart and fall away, sounding like a slow encroaching descent. The final stop of the sound is not a seamless one, as the final strings of the hurdy gurdy slowly stutter out and leave only the faint drone that the song began with, making the sound go from overwhelming to almost feeling too empty and leaving the audience with that emptiness as they continue through the album.

“Etienne”

“Etienne” is one of the most beautiful tracks on the album. Primarily instrumental, the track was inspired by Etienne-Louis Boulee, a French Architect whose work has been incredibly inspiring to Anhedonia. She states, “I like to imagine [Boullee] as the first person, at least in recorded history, that even tried to conceptualize the temple of simulacrum’s architecture. He was a visionary in that way to me. I imagine he must have felt so lonely, like Noah building the ark. That song was my ode to him.” The track feels almost mournful, and the first time I listened to it, it felt gripping. My initial feelings towards the song were that it gave me this overwhelming feeling of seeing an old friend and realizing you cannot help them, you can only hold onto the moments you will have with them before they leave your life in some way. It is a lonely, mournful, and beautiful track, played on a 120-year old Piano belonging to Anhedonia’s grandmother. It is a deeply emotional track, and the feelings resonate strongly not just for the audience but to Anhedonia as well. The final moments of the track are a staticy old sermon being spoken. 

The speaker describes a man who aimed to end his life through inducing a heart attack by running, however in the process had found that running made him feel so good that he no longer felt that he wanted to end his life. Anhedonia spoke about the choice to include this via tumblr, stating that she had bought an old box of sermon tapes from the 70s and 80s and that moment had just stuck out to her so much she felt she had to include it in the track. 

“Thatorchia”

“Thatorchia” is a term Anhedonia coined to describe the feeling of bitter acceptance that God will let you near but will never let you stay. This track is fully instrumental, filled with dark swirling drone sounds and ambient noise, as well as these rising vocal loops peering through the cracks of sound. As the song continues, the sounds meld and clash with the vocalizations to create this bitter yearning feeling that, as the song continues, feels less like pleading and more like mourning. It matches the word Anhedonia coined exceedingly well, and the song is trance inducing as the sounds clash and meld together in certain areas, and darker and heavier tones are added to accentuate the mournful and pleading feelings together all at once. Finally, the song ends with the heavier tones and droning ending abruptly, leaving only one final vocalization to ring out the final feeling: acceptance.

“Amber Waves”

The final track on the EP, “Amber Waves” describes a person who has fallen into desolation. The speaker began a cycle of taking drugs in order to feel one with God, and now, the drugs have left them unable to feel at all. They no longer have motivation to live for themselves, and likely find themselves in the place that Anhedonia dictates “The Maze”, a place below the Great Dark she describes where people lose themselves entirely.The song is quiet and the singing is delicate, a major shift from the previous songs darker tones and acceptance. The shift from between this song and the previous tracks is stark, like a punch to the gut, and it leaves the listener feeling just as carved out and empty as the speaker. The speaker sings “Is it not fun / to feel many other ways? / What you do / is nothing to me / Is it not fun / in the catatonia?” showing their lack of emotional response to their lover leaving them as well as their resignation to allow themselves to feel this emptiness. Even in the moments where Anhedonia isn’t singing, the heavier guitar still feels empty, still feels like there is more sound waiting to fill in the space it leaves around it. It is a heavy song, and one of the hardest to listen to in the EP due to the empty dread the song leaves you with. It is masterfully crafted to do this exact thing, and it is an absolutely beautiful song despite it’s bleak topic, something Anhedonia is a master at doing. The track eventually leaves us with one last word, a simple phrase: “I can’t feel anything,” a strong contrast to our starting point of the piece, which began with “Nearer, My God, To Thee” and leaving us, the listeners, within the cycle and likely more aware of our place in it than ever before. 

 Anhedonia’s “Perverts” is a masterclass not just in storytelling, but the ability to create a space that can tell your story for you. Throughout the entire piece, even with it’s minimal lyric content at times, entire worlds can be created and entire meanings can be taken from songs that only give you the space and world to create them. It is haunting, eerie, disturbing, beautiful, and resonates all at once, and I think it is a project that I will carry with me for a long time.

Personal Thoughts

In my initial listen of the album, I chose to take a walk in the cold at night to be able to fully realize the world of “Perverts”, and I found that with even no visuals, it felt like experiencing an entire film. I do not think this album should be experienced in the same way any other artists’ albums should be. “Perverts” is not meant to be a standard album you add into your playlists and listen to constantly, and that is absolutely okay. It expands on what an EP can be and what it can provide to the listener. If you listen to the album, I recommend keeping your mind open and allow yourself to create the stories with the world she creates for you masterfully and beautifully.

I even recommend looking inward to see yourself in this cycle, observe your own life through this world and find what it reveals to you about yourself. Do you have more shame, or do you feel content in your place? One of the most fascinating things I’ve found in this album is just comprehending Anhedonia’s feelings and philosophies about the ways we envision the world around us. I’ve noticed the behavior in friends and the people around me, ways in which they may not even realize just how much it is happening to them. I’ve also found myself with questions I have to try to find answers for. For example, something I continually ponder after the release of this album is the idea that, when we search for proximity to God, why is it things that are so often the opposite of what God is taught to want that give us that feeling? Drugs, alcohol, tattoos, sex, all of these things are taught as being against Godliness, and yet they bring us feeling closer than ever in the euphoria of the ring. My answer? I don’t know yet, and that’s okay. I believe it to lie in the nature of societal expectations and taboos and what drives us to reach out to taboos and find pleasure in them. Is it just their nature? That they are not supposed to be good, and therefore we feel exhilarated in reaching for them? Or is there genuine goodness to be found in them? Many of the times, that is not at all the case, especially the more extreme cases explored in songs like “Punish”. The subject matter of “Punish” is one that is nowhere near as heavily criticized by church teachings as it should be, however.

Another thing I can’t help but wonder is how terrifying it would be past the veil. Evil and Hell and Purgatory are comprehendible. However, being one with God would mean seeing past into something that mortality does not allow, and is that not terrifying? How could we even comprehend Godliness if we ever found a breach within the veil without it being equally, or even more, terrifying that the evils we can imagine filling Hell. Perhaps that’s why some people allow themselves to lose themselves within the simulacrum fully.

Whether you toss out “Perverts” or decide to carry it with you forever, it is still a beautiful album that is deeply unique, and I find myself incredibly excited for any and all of Anhedonia’s next words. As a final note, remember: it’s happening to everybody.