Sometimes, I remember how it felt to believe. The aching, constant hum that was always inside me. Faith is not always the rare and precious feeling of wonder that arrives without warning, when the nature of the world stretches out in front of you and catches in your throat. That is awe, which can—if you believe—reinvigorate the faithful, remind them of glory and power and majesty. But faith itself is like love: as magical and revolutionary as it is mundane and commonplace.
Real faith exhausts. It demands. It becomes rote even for the most ardent. There is a reason that most churches adopt some kind of liturgy; you cannot reinvent a wheel that must be constantly in use. To believe something with every atom of your being requires you to let it take over. There are only so many awe-inspiring moments in a life; most of a life is sweeping the floor and clicking on the computer and running an errand. Faith is not what you do in a church on Sunday; faith is a whole life.
Religion, then, for all its flaws, is in its purest form meant to provide a grounding place for that whole life, an occasional reminder of what you believe that can sustain that germ of conviction throughout the monotony of living. That's why, I think, hymns are repetitive. They lull and crest but the lyrics are often few, repeated. A good hymn should reappear in your mind throughout the week, become additive to your life in the world, surprise you without warning. Still, more than a decade after I lost my own faith, a hymn will emerge from my subconscious, distorted and broken, but still deep in there.
When these hymns emerge, they sound almost like the haunting, distorted voice that sings the 19th-century hymn "Nearer, My God, To Thee" at the very beginning of the title track of Ethel Cain's new album, Perverts. On Tumblr, Cain wrote that the hymn "was always my favorite hymn by a long shot. I wanted to emulate listening to it on the tiny tape player in that little library for Perverts." From there, the song devolves. It is a little over 12 minutes long, and contains few additional lyrics. A symphonic droning fills the space.
Critics have been rolling Perverts around in their mouths since its release last Thursday, trying to taste it. It is a bold, dark turn from Cain's 2022 debut LP, Preacher's Daughter.
On Preacher's Daughter—a concept album about faith, and trans-generational trauma, and cults, and cannibalism—Cain has said she tells the story of her evil alter-ego. But sonically, it's approachable. Preacher's Daughter is Americana. It's ethereal. It's goth-rock. It has arguably two power ballads on it. In a world of young artists vying for the attention of Top 40 stations and stadium tours, Cain was ambitious in a different way. She proposed that album as the first of a trilogy she dubbed the "Ethel Cain Cinematic Universe," and then she released Perverts instead.
Perverts is not a concept album as much as it is a wall of sound, a baptism of noise. It is despairing and dark and droning and difficult. The few lyrics that exist on it are repeated as mantras. Cain repeats, "Heaven has forsaken the masturbator," and "I love you," and “If you love me, keep it to yourself," and "It feels good." The easy, catchy lyrics of Preacher's Daughter are nowhere to be found here. Instead, you are dropped into a throbbing darkness, unsure of the way out. It's industrial and haunting and mysterious. It is claustrophobic.
Many critics have argued that Cain is trying to cull her fanbase, that this album is meant to arrest her rising stardom. From a certain point of view, that wouldn't be out of character. Even as Preacher's Daughter was gaining traction with the mainstream, Cain was not following the rules of fame. She called Joe Biden a bitch and called for the return of political assassinations in response to the United States making another weapons deal with Israel. Shortly after Perverts was released, Cain wrote a post about political corruption with the hashtag #KillMoreCEOs attached. A recent video posted to her robust YouTube channel is titled, "my favorite types of gay porn." It makes sense that people are assuming that abrasion (of her mainstream fans, of the world) is a goal.
But Cain herself has said she isn't trying to push away from the mainstream; she said just likes drone music and wants to make it. Maybe Perverts isn't a dare, but a release. Maybe the title isn't meant to frighten the casuals and castigate the adherents, but to signal a self-proclamation, a reclaiming.
Ethel Cain, whose real name is Hayden Anhedönia, is a trans woman who was raised in the Southern Baptist Church and whose father was a deacon. She has explained that she only sang "Nearer, My God, To Thee" on Perverts because she has a personal connection to it: "i don’t really listen to hymns otherwise, they usually just bring back bad memories lol."
This, we have in common. I too was raised in the church as a pastor's daughter. I too have felt the brightness of faith and the gaping emptiness of its departure. I too have walked round and round inside the stations of the cross, and felt the exhaustion that repetition can create. To me, Perverts is not so much an act of defiance, but the sound of something clicking into place. There's an expanse within Perverts that beckons the sublime.
The thing about losing your faith is that even if you feel you are right, and know that your stance is for the best, you can't escape the pain that comes from watching your new faithlessness rob life's mundanity of its shimmer. If faith is no longer there to provide you with purpose and the world around you with beauty, you need to find it elsewhere.
An allegory Cain wrote on Tumblr in October ends with the same refrain as Perverts: "It’s happening to every-body." In that allegory, Cain describes the loss of a beautiful woods where she could sing unending praise, its replacement with a desolate gray land, and her desperation to reach some theater of the divine.
“I can’t feel anything,” she croaks at the end of Perverts. But at least in my experience, that's the first step. Without faith through religion, you think you lose the divine, that you've been rejected from salvation and with it beauty—at least at first. But slowly it opens up before you—the music, your life, the world—and you realize that all of this pain, all of this awful, ceaseless droning, can be used to build something else.
