On May 21st, 1997, English rock band Radiohead released their third studio album, OK Computer, widely regarded as one of the single greatest LPs of all time.

The band’s debut single, “Creep,” had been a massive hit, laying the foundation for a gold-selling and critically lauded follow-up in their sophomore album The Bends, and a career whose stratospheric levels of success were confirmed not only by the gangbusters numbers that OK Computer put up in the weeks following its release, but also by the fact that critics almost immediately declared it one of the most important records of that decade.

As they wrapped the touring and promotional cycle of OK Computer, however, Radiohead now sought to get away from their own success.

Releasing three albums in four years had emotionally and physically wrecked the band. Lead singer Thom Yorke and guitarist Ed O’Brien both developed clinical depression. The tour in particular drained all those involved, dragging on long past the point where any of them wanted to keep going. By the end of it, the five members—who had been close friends since university—were barely speaking.

“I think I’m meant to be dead,” Yorke told The Guardian in an interview in 2000. “I was a complete fucking mess when OK Computer finished…I mean, really, really ill.”

That same year, the band put out their fourth studio album, Kid A. They had released no singles or promotional materials whatsoever. 

To longtime fans and critics alike, it was a provocation.

Kid A was both immediately successful and massively contentious. It debuted at number one on both the UK albums chart and the Billboard 200, and was certified platinum in six countries simultaneously. 

Despite such staggering commercial success, a lot of people hated it. 

Andrew Smith of The Observer called Kid A “a commercial suicide note.” “On first listen,” wrote David Browne for Entertainment Weekly, “Kid A sounds like doggerel.”

Salon called it “a fine and confused piece of work.” In a claim truly for the ages in how much cleverer it thought itself than it actually was, Rolling Stone’s David Fricke wrote that “The first track on Radiohead’s fourth album is called ‘Everything in Its Right Place’.” 

“Actually,” Fricke continued, “nothing in the song sounds like it is in its proper place.”

Fucking got ‘em, David.

That’s not to say the album was universally panned—far from it. Hell, that Rolling Stone review gave it four-out-of-five stars.

“Kid A is brilliance swathed in bleakness,” wrote Indy Week’s Ginny Yu.

Pitchfork gave it a perfect “10.”

For all the fervour around it, what Kid A ultimately did more than anything is set a precedent. It condemned historians and music critics alike to forever tell the story of Radiohead in two parts: that of the rock band which preceded Kid A, and that of the generationally talented artists who succeeded it.

Kid A looms large over Radiohead’s discography precisely because they didn’t turn around and make OK Computer again. It wasn’t that they needed to get anything out of their system before writing The Bends 2—instead, they went ahead and released Amnesiac, an album which Entertainment Weekly mused was “a more frustrating, even infuriating, work than their just eight months old last release, Kid A.”

The thing is, Radiohead never really got less frustrating or infuriating in the intervening years. Each of their albums was its own point of departure—more political, more esoteric, more experimental, more of the type of thing that would make your dad insist they fell off some time in the late 90s. 

Moreover, the band haven’t put out a new album since 2016’s A Moon Shaped Pool, making most of this a rather pointless history lesson. Or at least it would have been, had Ethel Cain not released a new project.

Rewind: In 2022 Hayden Silas Anhedönia—better known to the world as Ethel Cain, gothic rock/dream-pop up-and-coming indie darling—releases her first full-length album, Preacher’s Daughter, to both commercial traction and critical acclaim.

Cain is a novelty among contemporary artists insofar as she seems particularly devoted to music as a means of storytelling. Both her music and stage persona are replete with signifiers whose meaning extends far beyond what can be gleaned from a simple listen. Preacher’s Daughter is a sprawling concept album about the daughter of a deacon, and that’s only scratching the surface of things.

I’ll not burden you with the rest of the “lore” because, frankly, I neither know nor care for it. I’m ambivalent to the marketing and Tumblr ephemera which seem to accompany all of Cain’s releases in part because I maintain the opinion that I shouldn’t have to read an ARG to want to like an album; all I want to do is be able to listen to it.

Maybe that makes me just a bit too old-fashioned to “get” Ethel Cain, though it doesn’t preclude my ability to understand exactly how significant she is to the present moment.

Cain is an artist who feels out of place in the contemporary world of megastars like Chappell Roan, Sabrina Carpenter, and—of course—Taylor Swift, whose albums are for better and worse more collections of singles (“bangers,” if you will) than anything else. While Cain certainly has a handful of songs which sound like obvious single fodder, almost-nine-minute monsters like “Thoroughfare” and “God’s Country” equally populate those same records.

“Alternative,”—at least in the sense the term carried some ten-odd years ago—feels perhaps the best label for one to ascribe Cain. She’s an artist’s artist, at least to the extent that any contemporary pop star can be.

To call Preacher’s Daughter merely a hit seems to underserve it somewhat; in an era where a significant plurality of music listeners don’t seem to give a shit about the album form, this is an LP that people actually treated as a complete work. Regardless of that fact, it must also be acknowledged that Preacher’s Daughter was a hit, and a hit in the most conventional contemporary sense—it found itself a niche on TikTok.

For all of the artistry and symbolism of her work, a large portion of Cain’s following comes from an app best known for promoting anti-intellectualism and drop-shipping scams in the format of 60-second videos. It’s a following which instinctively flocked to songs like “Crush” and “American Teenager,” both of which sound like Nicole Dollanganger’s lyrics draped over Jack Antonoff production.

It is also an admittedly reactionary and insular community, perhaps matched only in these qualities by fans of Taylor Swift and a handful of K-Pop groups.

To call Cain’s January 8th, 2025 release, Perverts, a slap in the face to these people is perhaps oversimplifying things, though it nonetheless read as such to many of those on the ailing Twitter dot com.

Perverts is the reason for the aforementioned history lesson. To put it in almost reductively accessible terms: Perverts is Ethel Cain’s Kid A.

To some, comparing Mother Cain to The Incel Band™ might seem ludicrous, heretical even. Rest assured though, that while the similarities may not be obvious, they most assuredly are there.

Among the defining features of Ethel Cain’s artistic image—symbology and aesthetics aside, is the degree to which she has become involved in social networking platform Tumblr. If Tumblr has “main characters” these days—celebrities active and engaged with fans in the same way writers like Neil Gaiman (yikes!) were in the twenty-teens—Ethel Cain is doubtlessly among them.

While I personally despise the notion that deeper meaning can be extrapolated from a record by reading plot summaries, Wiki pages, and Tumblr asks than from listening to the record itself, I would be loath not to recognize that this obsessive, parasocial tendency amidst her fans is a crucial part of Cain’s success.

Said differently: Cain is a daughter of and a successor to the online music culture that Radiohead helped create.

A large part of the Radiohead mythos is that the band were early adopters of the internet. They were a massive presence in the emergent online music community of the late nineties and early 2000s, beloved by both a new wave of critical voices (such as the aforementioned Pitchfork) and forums alike.

Fans didn’t just talk about Radiohead, either, they participated in a process of meaning-making for the band. From circulating demos and bootlegs, to making fansites expressly to engage with and about the band, Radiohead became as much a product of the people listening to their music as the five guys making it themselves.

One could well argue that one reason why the band persists as much as they do within the loosely defined ethno-genre of “/mu/core” is that a certain generation of guy was exposed at the right place and the right time to Radiohead by virtue of the internet, especially considering such stunts as releasing their 2008 opus In Rainbows on a pay-what-you-can model.

Kid A has a lot of that early internet DNA in it. The album was among the earliest to be leaked online prior to release, something which has become such a fixture of the album cycle today as to be a type of viral marketing in its own right.

That Radiohead get celebrated as artists among artists while Cain still struggles for broader recognition, frequently being called an “alt-pop star,” is perhaps a fact of her fanbase and her own femininity. Women don’t get a lot of leeway for deviation in the industry; if ever you were “mainstream” you’re generally expected to stay as such.

There are outliers in your Björks, Fionna Apples, etc., though generally speaking even these capital-a artistes get pigeonholed in the nebulous worlds of “Alternative,” audiophilia, and RateYourMusic dot com darlinghood. The former’s foreigness made her brief stint in pop stardom easy enough to write off, while the latter has almost embraced her peripheral position by removing her music wholesale from TikTok and making an improvisational experimental folk record that took her five years to record.

Despite her distinctiveness amid a largely homogenous and bloated pop landscape, the very thing that has made Cain into an almost-household name—her devoted base of (mostly) young, (mostly) female “stans”—equally makes her easy to write off by a music culture forever tainted by the misogyny of the Chan boards which shaped it for much of the twenty-teens.

It’s these fans who were staying up to the wee hours of the morning on the night of January 8th, and equally these fans who were vocally disappointed—nay, incensed—that this album was not a reiteration of the largely digestible goblincore Southern Gothic synth-pop Cain’s music had been to this point.

Perhaps even more so than Kid A, Perverts has been met by an immediate and resounding fan response. The crux of a lot of this discussion is that the album is “scary.” Users post variations on that sentiment affixed with .gifs from horror games and screengrabs of contemporary horror movies straight off of aesthetic Pinterest mood boards.

It’s a sort of anti-intellectual response that feels the logical extension of her “yassification” at the hands of Twitter, Tumblr, and TikTok since at least the release of extended play Inbred, but it also belies a deeper truth about the extent to which Perverts differs from both its preceding discography, and the expectations placed upon it by fans because of that body of work.

One-thousand words into this review, let’s get this out of the way and talk about the record proper. 

Perverts is a drone project.

I say “project,” because Cain herself seemingly refuses to call it an album. At almost exactly an hour-and-a-half, it would certainly seem unwieldy for the format. Heaven only knows whether you could even get it to fit on two LPs.

I say “drone” because, well…listen to it. The opening title track clocks in at twelve minutes, most of which are comprised of ambient, bassy hums, and a heavily distorted voice repeating “Heaven has forsaken the masturbator.” 

One can see how those expecting a more “conventional” Cain album would have had a rude awakening.

Perverts is a demanding listen. I’ve seen many critics call it “inaccessible.” I’m tempted to agree, at least on the level of acoustics, though I don’t think it’s entirely accurate.

I find accessibility a poor way of framing music, generally speaking, given how the medium demands pretty much only your attention and ability to press “Play.” We don’t tend to frame film in this way, for instance, beyond the concessions we make to such questions as “What streaming service is that on again?”

There are obviously conflicting dimensions to this—live/in-person music, film, and theatre all have different accessibility considerations (both physical and financial) than their recorded counterparts. However, when we talk about “accessibility” in music, what we tend to mean often has less to do with one’s ability to listen full-stop, than one’s ability to “Get” it.

Even then, I don’t think it’s hard to “Get” this project, nor do I think that Cain is trying to be obtuse. By her own admission, this is her doing the thing she had always wanted to do. Her points of reference are not that out there, nor is she demanding you sit down and consume a Grad school syllabus’ worth of experimental music before listening to this project. She’s just putting it out there and trusting that you, the listener, are grown enough to figure out what to make of it yourself.

Thematically, the subject matter Cain is dealing with is hardly different from her previous outings. “Perverts” operates on the level of subtlety as to sample “Nearer, My God, to Thee.” 

This is still a project about Religion, trauma, and (as the name would imply) the dark underside of sexuality and sexual predation. Cain has made no secret that the project was originally a character study of the eponymous Perverts. Of that would-be project, only “Punish” and “Amber Waves” survive relatively unaltered, with the former song about a pedophile, in Cain’s own words, and the latter a disturbed plea to a violent lover.

Perverts is by no means unrecognizable, but the familiar elements are laden with a decisively eschatological bent.

Where it differs, of course, is in the acoustic character of the project and in its sheer, gargantuan length. To one not conditioned to putting on an album and letting it play without thinking about the divisions of tracks, the length of certain cuts on Perverts proves a hurdle in itself. 

You’d be forgiven even for missing the fact that Perverts has lyrics. The streaming version on Spotify expressly disables the option to show them on many songs, and what little one can make out on a first listen muddles with the found soundscapes and film samples that make up tracks like closer “Amber Waves.”

Add to the fact that not even the pedants at WhoSampled.com have figured out exactly where Cain is pulling some of said samples from, and the question of what is being said and by whom looms large. 

These questions of voice, speech, and agency invoke obvious comparisons to such slowcore titans as Godspeed You! Black Emperor, with F# A# ∞’s introductory spoken-word poem and Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven’s “Sleep” suite coming readily to mind.

While Perverts obviously enfolds a lot of the drone and ambient genres, this focus on sampling and field recording lend it a touch of the musique concrète. It’s a style that works well with Cain’s more documentarian tendencies, becoming a kind of sonic Soviet Realism for rural Florida.

Length here works to create the signification of naturalism; something amorphous, organic, and deliberately unpolished. These are songs not constrained by the bounds of radio play or the TikTok algorithm or any other arbitrary means by which to impart the end-user with a feeling that can be effectively commercialized. The songs are long because that’s how long they need to be, at least in Cain’s mind,

This is, however, where I think streaming arguably does this album a disservice. Knowing that at times tracks will descend into nearly two minutes of near-silence makes the “Skip” button all that more tempting, and the “Skip” button is the destroyer of art.

Strangely, Perverts reminds me at times of Onkyō music—a hyper-niche genre of Japanese electroacoustic free improvisation and drone. Onkyō revels in the impulse to “lean in.” Traditionally, it is played extremely quietly, in part because of constraints of the noise By-law at the residential venue in Tokyo around which the loosely defined experimental noise scene had begun to form.

Onkyō often attempts to achieve as close as possible to complete silence, creating a tension where the listener is forced to interrogate whether they are hearing or merely imagining the presence of noise.

At its best, it's that same tension that Perverts achieves—making listeners reflect and internalize what it is they’re listening rather than just letting some hyper-slick synth-pop wash over them.

In a now-deleted Tumblr post in October 2024, Cain bemoaned the inability of contemporary audiences to engage sincerely and honestly with culture and artistic works. “Irony epedemic” was the phrase which pundits seized on from the thread, and it’s one which has proven to have legs in the interceding months of internet conversation.

It’s hard not to see Perverts as an embodiment of those sentiments, as a counter-argument written in song, an hour-and-thirty-minute thesis on taking things on their own terms.

Of course, that belies the thousands of Cain fans who took to Twitter to meme about the album immediately, a phenomenon which itself drew a subsequent round of self-critical metacommentary from Cain’s fan community.

In the course of reading what other people are saying about this album, I’ve read a lot of urgent interjections as to what exactly people think this project is. Cain’s fans, many at a loss for what to make of such a radical departure from their comfort zone, seemed to desperately search for a frame of reference into which to jam Perverts such that they might make some sense of it.

Some have called it a movie soundtrack. Some, an industrial record. Most people believe it’s a provocation, alternatively towards her fans, Barrack Obama, or “the mainstream.”

It is self-evidently none of those things. 

It’s not a movie soundtrack, because it simply wasn’t written for any film. It’s not an industrial record, because generically it exists within an entirely different space of (admittedly) grating industrial music. It’s not a provocation against Obama because frankly I doubt Cain cares enough to let him monopolize her artistic direction.

Perverts by Ethel Cain simply is.

Perverts is a project which demands to be taken on its own terms. It is a product of one of the most sincere artists working today, and yet it is saddled with a fanbase completely unprepared for it and who engage through most things in a practice of mimetic arms-length irony.

I realize I’ve made a hypocrite of myself in framing it as anything—much less as corollary to a Radiohead album. However my framing device is not a suspension of my own sincerity, but rather a gesture towards it.

On arguably the only level that matters, Kid A and Perverts share nothing in common. They sound almost nothing alike, and are products of different artists working through different preoccupations in radically different genres.

What little they do share, crucially, is context. Both are departures, stalwart refusals of conformity, beloved and reviled both for that fact. To call Perverts “Ethel Cain’s Kid A” is ultimately a call to treat it as such: In being so aggressively unlike any album which contains singles like “Crush” or “American Teenage,” Perverts becomes a sort of artist statement. 

I would call this “The first Good Album Ethel Cain has Made,” though that would be a dismissive and contentious statement in itself, and only serve to detract from the crux of what makes Perverts exceptional.

The album would be a solid showing in any other discography. It’s the type of release which would feel right at home with artists like Uboa, or Midwife, or claire rousay. It’s also crucially not a release by any of said artists, which is arguably why it hits as hard as it does.

Whether or not I like Cain’s discography of prior work (or even this album!), the critic in me recognizes it is essential. This new Ethel Cain—both the project and the artist who made it—is important. 

At the beginning of a new year, this is a bold and decisive step from one of pop music’s most interesting contemporaries. It is an album which implicitly promises much, much more to come, but contains enough to satisfy even the most ravenous listener in the meantime.

Reviewing Perverts so close to its release feels almost futile. So monolithic and self-assured is the scope of this record that in five, ten, twenty years there may well be some shitheel running a student paper who calls some new album “___’s Perverts by Ethel Cain.” 

That, to me, seems like a good thing.