Ethel Cain // Perverts

Post by Misha //

The ascension of Ethel Cain happened at a time in my life when I wasn’t listening to very much music, nor logging on to consume missives about the daily waxings and wanings, the eruptions, the quiet implosions within the music landscape. My introduction to Ethel Cain came when I was in Denmark for a wedding. There was a sauna at the hostel where I was staying, which I’m told is normal for hostels in Denmark. I went in there one night with my headphones and let Spotify have its way with me. Crush started playing. I listened to it on repeat until I couldn’t sweat anymore. It was perfect.

All this to say that I missed pretty much all of the text – both sub and con – around this album, of which I was aware only insofar as it filtered through to me in annoyingly oblique social media references. I have since then, through a few haphazard Google searches and skimmed-over Wikipedia articles, scraped just the topmost crust on the whole thing, just deep enough to remain steadfast in my desire to be as offline as humanly possible.

In broad strokes, what I read led me to understand that I should not expect anything anywhere even remotely close to the inviting warmth of Crush from the new Ethel Cain album. I was given to understand, also, that this was due in part to a significant portion of the Ethel Cain fanbase being what might be called Terminally Online in such a way that caused Hayden Anhedönia (the real person behind Ethel Cain) to feel that she was not being taken seriously as an artist. Her new album, Perverts, which opens with a 12 minute drone track, appears to assert itself in opposition to the parasocial memefication of her persona, and as a reaffirmation of her artistic independence.

I apologize if I’m missing some nuance here. Again, I couldn’t dig any deeper than the topmost crust due to having a modicum of respect for my mental health.

(Also – no need to worry, this is not going to be a think piece on the fraught dynamic between artist, fan, and algorithm in the social media age. If you would like to read one of those plenty exist at various points along the ever shortening sincere-appreciation-to-hot-take pipeline.)

In some ways I’m aware that by invoking any level of the context around this album, topmost crust or otherwise, I am perhaps betraying the wishes of the artist – that her music be taken purely on its own terms, divorced of its context. I set out initially to do that. To write only of its darkness, the barrenness, the chill. Which is beautiful in its own dark, barren, chilly right, regardless of the circumstances around its creation.

But as someone who, like many of us, has long wrestled with my own uneasy gripes about coexisting with the internet, it’s hard not to read this album – in its bombed out empty spaces, its ragged wails, its radioactive fuzz, its waterlogged drums, its sawbuzz strings – as a guttural cry from deep within the creative bog in which we presently find ourselves so futilely mired. How to break through? How to break out? How to discuss real things? How to make art instead of content? How to tell the difference? Whose fault is it if we can’t – the executive? The politician? The all-seeing god of irony? How did we get here? How do we leave?

Not that the album sets out to answer these questions. Not that it even asks them, as such. Rather, it claws at them. It raises welts around them. It makes them impossible to stop picking at. Or that’s what it did for me.

A word on the orthodoxy of content divorced from context: I’ve never really believed in it, to be honest. It has always seemed to me an unnecessary leaving of meaning on the table. For instance, thinking about what this album might have to say about the state of creative discourse and creative life, based on the context in which it came into the world, does not dull my appreciation of the music. It makes it spark with aliveness.

But I also believe that there is a danger of art being swallowed by its context – by the discourse around it, by the takes, and the lore, and the endless ravenous dissection. So. I will say this. If I were asked to engage with this music in a pure way – without thinking about or making reference to its context at all – I might say something like this:

That this is the sound at the very center of the black hole where memory and belief disappear.

There’s no physical release of Perverts as of this writing, but you can buy it digitally on iTunes, stream anywhere, and buy Ethel Cain merch here.