Succeeding one of the best albums in 2022, Preacher’s Daughter, Ethel Cain unveils the sequel to her breakout release, Perverts, due Jan. 8 via Daughters of Cain.
Cain crafted Perverts over the past year in Coraopolis, Pennsylvania, and Tallahassee, Florida. The album weaves diverse musical influences, drawing on drone, noise, slowcore, and ambient sounds to create a deeply atmospheric experience. Accompanying the album release, Cain has shared an essay titled “The Consequence of Audience,” offering insight into her creative process and themes of the upcoming release.
The album’s lead single, “Punish,” out now on all streaming platforms, is a mesmerizing revelation that delves into complex emotions surrounding shame and self-justification. “I wonder how deep shame can run and how unforgivable an act could be that I may still justify it,” Cain reflects. “Would I tell myself it’s not my fault and I couldn’t help myself? Would anyone truly believe that? Would I?”
“The Consequence of Audience” reads:
“As I went there through the long, long wood, I felt nothing and I was nothing and I was at ease. The grey ash trees and their mottled plumage were as one with each other, curving and branching to form a ceiling overhead. There was wide separation between trunks, creating vast corridors stretching off in all directions before me, behind me, all around me. O, what praise I could sing of that never-ending dusk fall I spent between those oaks! None came with me, none came upon me, for I was alone and I was at ease. Yet came the day the trees broke, the corridor ended, and I was thrust upon the rocky expanse that was the Great Dark. There I saw first face and heard footstep, few and far between, but I was no longer alone. It was a shameful deed to carry these two naked hands as they clenched hotly, now in full display for all to see. I had never noticed them in the wood, for I was at ease. Here, the taut skin seemed to stretch and sweat, almost glowing, as if exasperated of their own grip. For as I wandered the Great Dark, there was not but grey, barren rock as far as any eye could see. It did make a passerby out of an observer. I saw them trudge by, fingers dipped into their open mouths desperate for wetness, the lolled tongue. There, in the wood, I was the watcher, but here I am nothing but displacing air. Yet, within the smothering toil of my apathy, I had heard the bell. Murmur of God between their slick, bent fingers ruffled the hair on the back of my neck. My muscles groaned against the weight of the skin around them, aching to be set loose.
“All at once, I saw, from where I stood, there rose a great dome atop a hill on the horizon before me. Yes, I saw it there with mine own two eyes! The white exterior peered at me with flat orifices obscured through the mist, barely distinguishable from the dark sky behind it, as though all the world beyond the dome was cut from the same slab, only slightly effaced. The convex roof sat atop a disk, held up by great ionic pillars circling the temple. Steps radiated out and down the slope, like ripples in a pond escaping a dropped stone. It was greater than life, greater than the wood, greater than all else which filled this dark, and my gullible delight was that it was all mine. Yes, all mine! One could follow me to it but they could not follow me in. My hands stretched outwards with an audible cracking in the bone as I crept forward there.
“I could not tell you the rest. I would not even attempt, for it would change nothing. To know if I did go completely naked into the theater of the divine. If I did need for nothing, want for nothing. If I was then full to the brim, cylindrical pull slid through my gaping jaw into my endless throat. If I saw it there, shimmering through the veil like pearlescent oil over crystal water. If it heard me singing with every atom that formed me, through every orifice and wound I had, polytonal in my begging for it to complete me with the fifth. If it looked into me, saw how I needed to know what God knows and to be with him. If it spoke back to me in flat dissonance, “how couldn’t ye?”
“It would be of no good to speak these things to you. In what way I was still returned to the ground, even if beneath it, intact with my puerile need to repeat my-self and my mistakes. Who would not climb the wall for a peer over the edge? The cautionary tale is the fool’s errand, and I am no fool. I am as my hands are; twisting in on themselves and bursting at the seams. I can-not contain the ache for sensation, just as I could not contain the grief as I fell, nor the agony as I crawled my way back to this rocky countryside, and lo! I am on my way there again now. I am, I am, I am! But I will not tell you the visceral details, as you already know them. You all do.
“It’s happening to everybody.”
Stay tuned for the album due out January 8, and stream “Punish” in the meantime to keep your anticipation at bay.
Watch the music video for “Punish,” co-directed by Ethel Cain and Silken Weinberg, here:
Photo courtesy of Ethel Cain
