What Ethel Cain’s ‘Perverts’ Tells Us About Gen Z’s Pivot Towards Fascism
Words: Princess Xixi
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Performative indifference has become perhaps the most valued social currency among gen z - Nonchalance Rules Everything Around Me, evidenced by the cutting dismissal of anyone speaking passionately on a given topic with a curt “what is bro yapping about”, or Letterboxd comment sections, which seem less like forums for film discussion than frenzied competitions to see who can make the snappiest possible one sentence, all-lowercase, brainrot word salad-filled encapsulation of a 90+ minute long creative endeavour.
Even expressing admiration for something beyond the safe, banal repetition of socially approved catchphrases - “ate”, “mothered”. “the second motherplane has hit the cuntagon” or “come onnnn”, “🔥”, etc if you’re a straight boy - is met with accusations of glazing, meatriding or, perhaps most damning of all, “doing too much”. As the ever-increasing ephemerality of social media accelerates culture to previously unseen levels, art is no longer to be dissected, pored over and analysed - it is to be shitposted. Consumed and shat out, then flushed away to make way for the internet’s next preoccupation. It may leave behind a skidmark or two in the form of a few mildly amusing tweets or memes, but the days of openly discussing the lasting emotional impact of art feels long gone. Art isn’t supposed to stay with you anymore and even the most lingering, affecting works amount to little more than a protracted but ultimately inconsequential period of emotional constipation.
On January 8th 2025, singer-songwriter and producer Ethel Cain (real name Hayden Anhedönia) released Perverts, her first full-length project since her critically acclaimed 2022 debut studio album, Preacher’s Daughter. Preacher’s Daughter is a beautifully conceived and executed concept album that blends elements of Americana, alternative rock, folk, ethereal wave, goth-pop and more. Despite Anhedönia’s wide range of sonic influences, her debut was still palatable enough to solidify her a young, mostly queer fanbase that crossed over with many of her other TikTok coquettecore contemporaries, leading to major festival bookings alongside artists like beabadoobee, Mitski and boygenius.
Yet despite Anhedönia’s bold sonic experimentation, Preacher’s Daughter is still a relatively accessible project even beyond its lead single American Teenager - which literally rips a guitar passage from Americana anthem Don’t Stop Believing - with the majority of the album’s tracks still adhering to pop song structure. Even the 6 minute long Ptolemaea, an industrial shoegaze-influenced track that culminates in a piercing scream, has fallen victim to the TikTok sound industrial complex.
Perverts is not that. Perverts is a 90 minute long experimental project drawing heavy inspiration from dark ambient, slowcore and drone. The title track which opens the project stretches over 10 minutes long and features the heavily distorted line “Heaven has forsaken the masturbator” repeated ad nauseam over an oppressive industrial soundscape consisting largely of jagged, atonal synths, unsettling field recordings and brown noise that wouldn’t sound out of place on post-Throbbing Gristle dark ambient cassettes, or the Silent HIll 2 OST. Unlike Ptolemaea, I somehow doubt Perverts will end up soundtracking thousands of female rage Mia Goth corecore edits.
Understanding the context of who the typical Ethel Cain stan is and which artists she tends to be aligned with, Anhedönia’s decision to open her first project Since Preacher’s Daughter with this track can only be interpreted as a very deliberate choice. It should also come as absolutely no surprise to anyone who has been paying attention. In the leadup to Perverts’ release, Anhedönia not only described in detail what the project would be like, but also set her expectations with how she hoped her fans would (and wouldn’t) respond to the project. She discussed on her Tumblr account how we are in an “irony epidemic… there is such a loss of sincerity and everything has to be a joke at all times”, bemoaning the fact that “i feel like no matter what i make or what i do, it will always get turned into a fucking joke… I am so stressed out already anticipating the stupid shit i’m gonna have to see about perverts lol”.
She wasn’t wrong. A quick scroll through Twitter or TikTok yields little discussion about Perverts beyond memes. The general public reception to Perverts could be boiled down to one of three main reactions:
A spooky reaction image captioned something along the lines of ‘me when i listen to Perverts’
Younger Ethel Cain stans bemoaning how weird and horrible the album is
Music nerds gloating about how the former group had been exposed for not appreciating “real art”
What none of these responses did, however, was actively engage with the music in any meaningful way, and as much as the third group’s smug insistence that the album was just too avant garde for the silly TikTok girlies to comprehend, I can’t help but feel that none of the above groups actually listened to the album the whole way through. Anhedönia opening Perverts the way she did was, in my mind, undoubtedly a decision made to filter out the American Teenager crowd. But equally, I don’t think the project is anywhere near as inaccessible as people claim, regardless of their ulterior motives. I don’t listen to much ambient or drone music - I’ve dipped my toes in here and there but the only works that have truly stuck with me are a few tracks by Aphex Twin, Flood by Boris and Ghosts I-IV by Nine Inch Nails - but despite this, I didn’t feel that the album was anywhere near as devoid of structure, melody and lyricism as its detractors (and in some cases supporters) claim.
Aside from the lead single Punish, songs like Vacillator feel like a stripped back, slowed down version of songs from Preacher’s Daughter. Onanist, as well as the final three tracks of the album - Amber Waves in particular - are all built around simple, melancholy chord progressions and feature fairly standard instrumentation. These tracks all carry the kind of haunting ethereality that characterised much of Anhhedönia’s earlier work and are hardly out of place in her discography. In fact, with this type of track making up more than half of the album’s tracklist, I can’t help but feel that Anhedönia choosing to open the album with such an abrasive track was a devious sleight of hand designed to filter out which people partaking in The Discourse had actually listened to it.
“As with most things in 2025 - the discussion around Perverts seems to revolve around everything but the music itself.”
Yet all this has been overlooked in the discourse surrounding the album. Rather than engaging, people are content to either shitpost about how scary it is, or use it as an excuse to dunk on people for being fake fans. As with most things in 2025 - the discussion around Perverts seems to revolve around everything but the music itself. Our collective inability to sincerely engage with art beyond a thick veneer of ironic detachment is a troubling sign of the times. The election of Trump cemented the harsh truth that Gen Z is simply becoming more conservative, and this is being reflected in attitudes towards art. People do not wish to be challenged or confronted by art - and any art that does so is written off as ‘bad’, ‘cringe’, ‘weird’ etc. Even ostensibly socially liberal circles have become increasingly puritanical - art condemned as “problematic” is doomed to exile and ostracisation rather than critique and interrogation. Revered as it is, I doubt John Waters could have released Pink Flamingos (1972) today.
As the violence of wealth inequality becomes increasingly undeniable, capitalism has ramped up the overwhelming flurry of content we are constantly bombarded with at such an alarming rate that this kind of shallow engagement with art is more than understandable. We are faced with so much information that no one has the time to properly process it anymore.
Yet, I truly believe that albums like Perverts have the power to shock people out of the trance-like vice grip our social media feeds have on us. And with social media platforms becoming little more than tools for fascist propaganda dissemination, I fear our only hope as a society will come in the form of people who choose to unplug and engage with the world in a way that goes beyond what social media has deemed acceptable. And maybe art like Perverts is one of the ways we can accomplish this. And even if Perverts is actually bad and/or just a giant shitpost - which it isn’t - I do have hope that it could well result in even just a few people’s media consumption habits developing into the long term emotional, intellectual and spiritual IBS that competent media literacy requires.
___STEADY_PAYWALL_
