Ethel Cain goes from hell to heaven and back on Perverts

It's a place where everyone is curved in on themself, perpetually upset with the people around them, presented with opportunities to make it up to heaven but unable to let go of their pride. Then, as he’s transported to heaven, he peers down and sees hell as just a tiny crack in the pavement – compared to the massive, perfect, overbearing glory of God, it’s nothing.

I don’t know if Ethel Cain's creator Hayden Anhedönia reads Lewis, but Perverts might as well be that book’s soundtrack.

Instead of following a character-driven plotline, like the instant-cult-classic debut Preacher’s Daughter, Perverts – billed as a standalone piece rather than a sophomore album – centers around a philosophy. Specifically, as Anhedönia elaborates in YouTube ramble sessions, vague Tumblr posts, and an absolutely beautiful “The Pilgrim’s Progress”-inspired short story, it’s about languishing in the mortal world, rising above it to simulate the experience of some sort of God, and trying to recreate that interaction at any cost. Countless artists have labored to emulate the experience of spirituality in their art; in tackling that challenge, Hayden Anhedönia's mode of expression as Ethel Cain is waves of guitar drones and spoken-word monologues, the creation of evolving atmospheres that wash over the listener and force them to curve into themselves.

As ambient as this album might be, though, it’s far from background music. This project isn’t interested in engaging those who aren’t willing to engage with it, and it’s not for everybody. But give Perverts ninety minutes, a nice pair of headphones, and all your attention. If you do, it will rewire your brain. Anhedönia's newest project might not have the rich lyricism or structure of Preacher’s Daughter – in fact, it barely has lyrics or a structure – but it paints an even richer picture than the debut.

Perverts’ first track begins with a distorted take on the 19th-century Christian hymn “Nearer, My God, To Thee” that opens up into a crushing eleven-minute atonal soundscape. Massive walls of static are surrounded by persistent alarm-esque beeps and occasional barely-decipherable vocals condemning 'the masturbator.' Listening to this song feels like wallowing in self-pity long after it’s any fun, like being closed in on, like waiting for a jump scare you’re certain is about to happen.

The first half of the record, like its intro, sits in unending despair, an interpretation of hell that looks less like fire and brimstone and more like a simulacra of Lewis’s “grey town”: a mundane and decaying Earth where nobody has joy but everybody is self-satisfied enough to feel sorry for themself, even as they hurt those around them. This project’s title suggests a running theme of sexual perversion, and while that theme is present, it’s not “perverts” in the reclaimed, fun way. It’s “perverts” in the very most literal sense of the word: humanity twisting its greatest gifts – love and sexuality – to their furthest deviations from the ideal, indulging in them at their very worst.

The three tracks following each include the word “love” as a prominent refrain, and none of those mentions are pleasant. “Punish” is a slowcore dirge about a pedophile, ashamed but not sorry, who harms himself repeatedly to simulate the bullet wound that his victim’s father gave him: “I am punished by love.” “Housofpsychoticwomn” sees Anhedönia obsessively monologue about a lost love before repeating “I love you” into oblivion – in the same tossed-off tone every time – until it starts to sound less like a statement and more like a threat. Finally, “Vacillator” plays like the abuser’s perspective in a manipulative relationship, the language of sex being twisted for coercion and sedation: “If you love me, keep it to yourself.” In this grey town, everyone is trying to fulfill themselves, trying to find the thing that will take them to heaven – and the process perverts them, compels them to abuse others, to hyperfocus on their pleasure over the pain of others.

Many of the best albums featuring stories this confrontational tend to make their music just as histrionic. By contrast, Perverts deals in understatement – it is both repetitive and deeply lethargic. At some points, like the quarter-hour “Pulldrone” – two string instruments modulating back and forth, so distorted that they start to sound more like a pair of hair clippers – the project feels interminable, even boring.

But perhaps the purpose of this project is to be punishingly long; after all, repetition is spiritual. The best contemporary Christian music transliterates the experience of experiencing God by repeating lyrics over and over, letting the listener think so hard and so viscerally that they fold into themselves and feel the presence of the divine above and inside them. Perverts accomplishes the same through negative space – not by blaring the same melodic refrain to create the feeling of unfettered joy, but by dragging itself out so thoroughly that the listener is forced to come to terms with themself, to think and metathink until they start thinking outside of their body.

Perverts’ true triumph is in its conclusion, where Ethel Cain's attempts to reach heaven succeed, reaching beauty so all-encompassing that it’s just as scary as anything on this project. On “Etienne” and “Thatchoria,” the instrumentals get bigger and bigger – layered strummed guitars, layers of subtle mechanical noise, actual melodies for once – until they overwhelm the listener, pummeling them with peace, showing them the horribly radiant face of God.

A recorded speech at the end of “Etienne” tells the story of a suicidal man who goes on a run in an attempt to induce a heart attack, but he keeps running and running, day after day, and, gradually, he doesn’t want to die anymore. Much like him, the listener has discovered the divine. Or have they?

Should hell be this monotonous, this Earthlike? Should heaven be this terrifying? And should the sin-filled characters in the grey town really be able to reach it? How right can Ethel Cain – or anyone trying to explain any of this – really be?

Perverts isn’t just about perversion in the human sense as explored in the project’s first half, but also in the heavenly realm, in humanity’s warped view of the worlds beyond our own. This project purports to show the listener heaven, but it can’t be accurate, can it? Can we really see beyond this world?

Anhedönia doesn’t appear to think so, but that’s not going to stop her from trying. To our senses, she posits, perhaps the best presentation of hell is monotony, perhaps the best presentation of heaven is terror, perhaps both are interminably prolonged but neither can be accessed in perpetuity, perhaps one truly has to be perverted – by love or sex or drugs or delusion – to even see any of it from here.

“Amber Waves,” the project’s finale, is by far the easiest track on the ears, but it’s also the most mournful – not hellish, not heavenly, just sad. Anhedönia sings about longing for the titular “amber waves,” perhaps a reference to the poem “America the Beautiful” and its divine view of the United States: “...here I am, empty, watchin’ love of mine leave / But I’ll be alright”. This veritably Dantean journey ends rather unceremoniously – with a five-minute wordless sombre guitar solo and the concluding words “I can’t feel anything.” After eighty minutes spent outside of this world, the pure mortality of this track is more apparent than anything.

Sometimes, I wonder how many nights C.S. Lewis stayed up trying to revisit the heaven he saw in his dream that night, how many times he closed his eyes while writing The Great Divorce and tried to re-channel that visceral experience, how many times he must have come up short.

Perverts is an album about heaven and hell, but more importantly, it’s about channeling the experience of being there – of teleporting to a place not built for Earthlings – at any cost, crashing back down, and re-entering the cycle forever. It approaches the very central questions of the divine: who are we to gain glimpses into hell, let alone heaven, on this Earth? Who are we to shrink infinite dimensions into three, to translate the divine into the ordinary, the eternal into the mortal? How far are we willing to go to do so? 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. And it showed me an experience unlike any I’ve had in music.