Wiki
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Release Date
8 January 2025
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Length
9 tracks
Perverts is Hayden Anhedönia’s 90-minute-long fourth extended play under the alias Ethel Cain, released on January 8, 2025. The record was fully produced and mixed by Hayden. The lead single, "Punish", was released on November 1, 2024. It is not related to the actual character of Ethel Cain that we learned about in 2022’s “Preacher’s Daughter”.
Ethel Cain released her debut studio album, Preacher's Daughter, in 2022, to critical acclaim. It centered on the fictional character of the same name, and contained Southern Gothic imagery and themes including religious indoctrination, sexual violence, isolation, and family trauma. Following its release, the album was included in several year-end lists of best music and she garnered a cult following online.
Speaking with Kiernan Shipka for Interview in June 2023, Cain expressed her excitement to "push it farther into the direction that always wanted to go" on her next full-length release, which is "10- to 20-minute songs just drenched in reverb, so slow, and super repetitive." She continued: "I have a huge affinity for slowcore and ambient music I feel a bit more confident doing that and less worried about what people will think."
In 2024, Cain debuted various songs at her third concert tour, the Childish Behaviour Tour, including "Punish" and "Amber Waves". In parallel, she published a video with a snippet of new music and clips from the 1990 British-Canadian horror film The Reflecting Skin. Following the end of the tour, Cain teased music on social media in October, by sharing grainy and black-and-white photos captioned with words including "Apathy", "Disruption", and "Assimilation".
As confirmed by NME in November 2024, Perverts is a standalone work and does not follow the story of Preacher's Daughter centered on the fictional character Ethel Cain. Prior to its release, Cain teased the themes of Perverts by publishing a short story titled "The Consequence of Audience".
In a press release at the time of the release of "Punish", the lead single off the record, Cain indicates that despite its 90-minute duration, Perverts is not an album, though does not clarify what it should be considered. Cain says that the recording "explores the droning ambient sound that gave Preacher's Daughter a captivatingly disturbing edge."
In an early review of the record by The Guardian published on January 2, 2025, the songs were categorized under various subgenres of industrial music, including power electronics, post-industrial, and drone music, with comparisons being drawn to the band Throbbing Gristle. Alternatively, some tracks were described as having "beautiful melodies" with music that "seems to be made up of ghostly echoes of instruments rather than instruments themselves."
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