Last month, Ethel Cain announced her new project Pervertsthe highly anticipated follow-up to her massive 2022 debut The preacher’s daughter. Now she unveils the first single ‘Punish’.
“I wonder how deep shame can run, and how unforgivable an act can be if I can still justify it in some way to make bearing it more bearable,” Cain said in the press release. “Would I tell myself that it wasn’t my fault and there was nothing I could do about it? Would anyone really believe that? Would I?”
Cain makes that clear Perverts is not an album, even though it is 90 minutes long. It explores the booming ambient sound that gave The preacher’s daughter a fascinatingly disturbing edge. She wrote, produced and recorded it this past year between Coraopolis, PA and Tallahassee, FL. This is what she said about it:
The consequences of public
As I walked there through the long, long forest, I felt nothing and was nothing and felt at ease. The gray ash trees and their spotted plumage were one piece with each other, arching and branching to form a ceiling above them. There was a great separation between the trunks, creating huge corridors that stretched in all directions, in front of me, behind me, all around me. Oh, what praises I could sing of that endless twilight I spent among those oaks! No one came with me, no one met me, because I was alone and I felt comfortable. Yet the day came when the trees broke, the corridor ended, and I was thrust onto the rocky expanse that was the Great Darkness. There I saw the first sight and heard footsteps, few and far between, but I was no longer alone. It was a shameful act to hold these two naked hands as they clung fiercely, now visible to all. I had never noticed them in the woods because I felt comfortable. Here the tight skin seemed to stretch and sweat, almost glowing, as if irritated by their own grip. For as I wandered through the Great Darkness, there was nothing but a gray, barren rock as far as the eye could see. It turned a passerby into an observer. I watched them trudge past, fingers plunged into their open mouths, desperate for wetness, tongues lolling. There, in the forest, I was the spectator, but here I am nothing but a movement of air. Yet, within the suffocating effort of my apathy, I had heard the bell. The murmur of God between their smooth, curved fingers ruffled the hair on the back of my neck. My muscles groaned against the weight of the skin around them, wanting to release.
Suddenly, from where I was standing, I saw a large dome rise up in front of me on top of a hill on the horizon. Yes, I saw it there with my own eyes! Its white exterior peered back at me with flat openings hidden by the mist, barely distinguishable from the dark sky beyond, as if the entire world outside the dome had been cut from the same sheet, only slightly erased. The convex roof sat atop a disk, supported by large ionic pillars that encircled the temple. Steps radiated up and down the slope, like ripples in a pond escaping a fallen stone. It was larger than life, larger than the forest, larger than everything else that filled this darkness, and my gullible joy was that it was all mine. Yes, all mine! People could follow me there, but they couldn’t follow me in. My hands stretched outward with an audible crunch of the bone as I crawled forward there.
I couldn’t tell you the rest. I wouldn’t even try because it wouldn’t change anything. To know if I entered the theater of the divine completely naked. If I didn’t need anything, I wouldn’t want anything. Then, when I was full to the brim, a cylindrical pull would slide through my gaping jaw and into my endless throat. When I saw it there, glistening through the veil like mother-of-pearl oil over crystalline water. If it heard me singing with every atom that formed me, through every opening and wound I had, polytonally in my plea to complete me with the fifth. When it looked into me, I saw how I needed to know what God knows and be with Him. If it spoke to me in outright dissonance, “How could you not?”
There would be no point in saying these things to you. In which way I was still brought back to the ground, even if it was underneath, intact with my childish need to repeat myself and my mistakes. Who wouldn’t climb the wall to look over the edge? The cautionary tale is the fool’s message, and I am no fool. I am as my hands are; that turn on themselves and burst at the seams. I cannot restrain the pain for sensation, just as I could not restrain the sorrow when I fell, nor the pain when I crawled back to this rocky landscape, and lo! I’m on my way again now. I am, I am, I am! But I won’t tell you the deep-seated details because you already know them. You all do that.
It happens to everyone.
Watch the “Punish” video, directed by Cain and Silken Weinberg, below.
Perverts is from 1/8.
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