Perverts

It is achingly beautiful and uncompromisingly hardcore. This might be too much to take, or too painful, or too frightening to you. But don’t worry: it is happening to everybody.

Its passion, its production, and Anhedönia’s carefully chosen collaborators elevate it from merely an expectation-confounding volte-face to something far greater: a musical assemblage of integrity and bravery, a new benchmark, and the epitome of a no-skip album.

‘Perverts’ is not an easy album to listen to by any definition – but that never takes away from how exceptional it is.

Although Cain is clearly pushing away one type of fan, this album is destined to bind others more closely to her. While I can’t work out when I’d choose to listen to it again, Perverts is distressingly exquisite. Repeated plays guarantee sonic Stockholm syndrome.

Darkness and doom prevail. Just how enjoyable that is depends entirely on how much you are prepared to embrace the darkness, and to submit to Ethel Cain’s semi-fictional world.

Perverts is Hayden Anhedönia’s first big step in establishing Ethel Cain as a character, a world and an idea, not just another ephemeral popstar pseudonym.

Casual fans may not last even three minutes. But for those who are willing to sit with its discomfort, ‘Perverts’ reveals hidden depths – the same way that eyes need time to adjust to low light. What it reflects is in the eye of the beholder.

Like Preacher’s Daughter, Perverts is a moving character portrait. This time, though, Cain’s protagonist finds peace and quiet not in literal death, but in the death of love.

It’s music made by a human being, intended for human beings, about losing one’s humanity in order to transcend it. By nature, that makes it immensely incomprehensible, scary and challenging, even difficult to get through for the uninitiated. But if you meet Anhedönia's creation on her terms, ready to plunge into the depths and emerge semi-alive, Perverts will open up to you – at least, it did for me.

Whether you’re feeling unnerved or oddly comforted, Perverts is an album that, in its all its strange and cryptic ways, demands you feel something.

While it’s true she could have easily continued along a similar path, writing alternative rock songs similar to her previous work, her daring effort here is admirable. It shows that she is willing to take chances and experiment because her music is less about her listeners and more about personal healing, and she will follow wherever the spirit of Ethel Cain leads her.

It’s a boundary-pushing work that, depending on the listener, could be considered either powerfully engrossing or deeply alienating.

Perverts is an awful lot to take in one sitting, and it often feels split between two distinct aesthetic modes: the wistful chill of slow but structured songs, and the brutal unmooring of eerie ambient collages. Both styles converge thematically on the same tortured core, but the switch between them can cause whiplash.

Taken on its own, in an era where most artists make albums a third of its length, the EP feels like a daunting endurance test. But the deeper you dig into Perverts and Ethel Cain's world, the more rewarding the experience.

Perverts’ 90-minute runtime and average song length of ten minutes could be intended to alienate, and undoubtedly harmed the record’s replay value for me as I continued to dig deeper into it. Perhaps this is the point, or perhaps I’ve missed it entirely. Either way, my respect for these compositions never dwindled because of their bravery and clarity of artistic vision.

Your mileage will vary depending on how you feel about experimentalism, discordancy, artistic expression, horror movies, Preacher’s Daughter and Cain’s earlier work, and perhaps the concept of SSRIs. It doesn’t totally work (or could have stood to be about a half-hour shorter). But as a primal scream against the daily horror of our current existence—one of “apathy” and “propaganda” that requires “crazy pills,” in Cain’s words, just to get through the day—it’s a fascinating artifact.

The result is perhaps the most wilful perversion of all: an artist on the brink of stardom who seems to be actively pushing it away.

It’s not an easy listen, in both an emotional and sonic sense. But, as an individual experience, it’s hard to ignore the boldness with which Hayden realises her vision, and the terrifying impact that such unfiltered, uncomfortable ambience can hold.

While this is a deeply experimental record, it is also subtly stunning in parts. [Jan 2025, p.31]