Hayden Anhedönia, a.k.a. Ethel Cain, has had a brush with fame and virality over the past few years. One of her first debut singles, “Crush,” off of her 2021 EP “Inbred,” is a triumphant yet sentimental psychedelic dream pop track. It details her life growing up in Florida and one of her first real crushes — an older guy she “dated.”
The single has over 50 million listens on Spotify and was a signifier for things to come for Cain. Her “Preacher’s Daughter” album has many songs on it that went TikTok viral, including “American Teenager,” “Strangers” and lastly — but most importantly — “Ptolemaea.”
“Ptolemaea” is a track that confused me, and many others, at first. It’s a slower, ambient track that mixes post-metal, industrial and doomgaze near its finale in order to bring about a sense of overwhelming dread and reckoning for its audience. Cain screams bloody murder when the song finally peaks.
“Make it stop, I’ve had enough/Stop, stop, stop, stop/Stop, stop, stop/STOP,” Cain sings on “Ptolemaea.”
Ethel Cain’s fourth EP, “Perverts” is a hurried departure from her 2022 debut record, “Preacher’s Daughter.” While there are songs similar to the best on “Preacher’s Daughter,” the majority of the EP consists of a darker, more ambient soundscape. The ideas from “Ptolemaea” are viscerally present on this EP through the instrumentation, foreboding lyrics and the overall darker tone of the project.
The length of this “extended play” is also something that perplexes me — it is 89 minutes long.
So why did Cain do this? Why make a dreary, desolate-sounding and frankly hard-to-listen-to project, as a departure from her ethereal-gothic pop sound?
“I just really like drone music and wanted to make some,” Cain said in a Tumblr post.
While it may be true Cain really appreciates the complexity and subtlety of drone music and simply wanted to make some of it herself, I — and the rest of the music community — have a hunch she is trying to purposely alienate herself from her new TikTok audience.
The lyrics — in typical Cain fashion — are religious in nature. Lots of talk about Heaven, Hell, committing sin and rebuking it. However, there is also another edge to the lyrics which I want to talk about: self-gratification through pleasure. Masturbation.
There are tons of direct and indirect nods to it in this EP. The purpose of these references is to both comment on the anti-hedonist views of most Christian denominations and to plainly gross out those eager enough to go on Cain’s genius page to check out the verified lyrics — like I do.
“Heaven has forsaken the masturbator…” Cain sings on the title track, “Perverts.”
Even besides the title track and its odd subject, Cain brings up her sex life in several other tracks including the EP’s only single, “Punish,” and “Onanist.”
“Whatever’s wrong with me/I will take to bed/I give in so easy/Nature chews on me/Little death like lead,” Cain sings on “Punish.”
All of it — the drone, the sexual lyrics, the length, the dark undertones, the brooding, etc. — lends itself to a more textured sound, not a monotone, spoken word record. I get what Cain was aiming for, however, not much of the EP— if any of it — lands cleanly on two feet here.
Where “Ptolemaea” shined, “Perverts” fell flat. There is no epic crescendo, the tracks each meander along at their own ill-defined pace. Sure, some get louder and louder, but none come to the logical conclusion that made “Ptolemaea” so appealing.
I hope that this is a brief departure for Cain, as I think that her pop songs are held together better. But if this is the sound she is going to be going with for a while, I think she will need to tighten her instrumental and lyrical focus in order to please both lanes of her audience.
