Ever since her song “Ptolemaea”—off her 2022 album “Preacher’s Daughter”—became a popular TikTok audio, I’ve been meaning to check out Ethel Cain’s music. That opportunity arrived when the 26-year-old released her latest project, “Perverts,” on Jan. 8. 

The project is a change from her signature Southern gothic folk sound, instead moving towards a more experimental side. This album weaves together bits of industrial noise music and post-rock, frequently using buzzy A/C sounding drones, distorted mechanical noises and crunchy electric guitars.  

Consisting of nine tracks, each song is longer than five minutes—a unique and nice change of pace from the current era of two-minute TikTok edit songs. That’s the best part of this album in my opinion: how Cain makes the listener wait. Each song is so long because she’s continuously building up to something bigger, larger, more dramatic, more terrifying and more catastrophic.  

Naturally, the sound design on this album is fantastic—each song is so complex and densely layered, each layer bleeding out from the next. Every sound is distinct yet very subtle; you can pick apart each sound, yet they all fit together into a cohesive image, like the brushstrokes of a Monet painting. In listening to the opening track, you can hear how Cain used white noise to build tension. In doing so, she makes the audience sit with discomfort before surprising them with the ominous bells that come in halfway through. The dissonant drones continue to build until listeners are completely enveloped in sound. It’s a brilliantly creepy song, and it was a great pick for an album opener.  

The instrumental sections are beautiful, but so are Cain’s vocals. Cain’s voice is very breathy and light on tracks like “Vacillator,” bringing to mind singers like Billie Eilish, yet hypnotic and tantalizing on tracks like “Punish,” reminiscent of Lana Del Rey. Cain’s voice echoes from the background of each track like the haunting call of a ghostly siren. Her echoing vocal harmonies on “Punish,” behind the slow and distorted sounds of the guitar, never fail to bring chills down my spine.  

Cain also experiments with spoken word in her track “Pulldrone,” where she recites a poem in a dead monotone voice and further fills the listener with a sense of dread. Throughout this album, she uses distorted voice recordings, like the constant echo of “I love you” in “Housofpsychoticwomn.”  

In conclusion, this latest EP from Cain is melancholic, unsettling and beautifully haunting. The vocals are gorgeous, as well as the thickly layered production. The album forces us to wait and challenges us to face discomfort and fear.