8 January 2025

Ethel Cain’s American Gothic

The singer found fame with her debut album in 2022 – but Perverts, a subversive horror movie of a record, shows she is uninterested in courting it.

By Emily Bootle

If you want to make it big as a musician today, there are several criteria you might try to meet. A clearly defined aesthetic. A readiness to become an “icon”. And songs easily truncated for social media posts, preferably with references to the zeitgeist or memorable lyrics that can themselves help to shape it.

Ethel Cain certainly meets the first two. The 26-year-old American singer-songwriter, whose real name is Hayden Anhedönia, broke through in 2022 with her debut album, Preacher’s Daughter, a concept record centred on a fictional woman – the character of Ethel, who Anhedönia says “possessed” her – who is making sense of her past as the abused daughter of a small-town pastor and navigating a love affair with the evil Isaiah. With flowing dark hair and sharp features, her vibe is heavy on the Southern Gothic: laced corsets, Bible references and exorcisms evoking an expansive, dusty and totally absorbing Americana. The songs blend 1990s grunge with doom metal, bedroom pop and sad-girl poetry; thick with nostalgia and intrigue, they speak directly to an online generation while showing a deft songwriting ability worthy of old-school critical respect. Cain grew up online, and was already gaining a fandom there by the time she released the album, which followed three self-released EPs. When she released Preacher’s Daughter, it became an instant cult classic.

How does one follow such an impactful debut, which not only had people hooked on the songs but created a whole world? By doing something completely different. Cain’s new collection Perverts is a nine-track EP of mostly dark, ambient distortion, with a couple of more conventionally melodic tracks cutting through the noise. It seems miles away from the Taylor Swift-esque writing of her most popular song, “American Teenager”, where Cain is “crying in the bleachers”. On the title track here, she repeats “Heaven has forsaken the masturbator” amid oppressive sounds which develop after a horror-movie cassette recording of a Southern hymn.

The EP is a particularly bold statement given her current cultural standing. In 2022, Cain was the most famous artist you’d never heard of – in 2025, she is the most obscure artist who, by now, you might well have done. Perverts seems unlikely to convert the casual fan who discovered “American Teenager” or “A House in Nebraska” on YouTube; Cain seems to have little to no interest in courting fame or success. Ironically, though, the nature of cult fandom in the online era means that followers who are invested – those who call themselves “Daughters of Cain”, a name whose Biblical evocations are multidimensional – could never be put off by something so trivial as a record of highly experimental and often impenetrable music. There is plenty of meaning to unpack here – all the better, perhaps, that it requires even greater analysis than before.

The Cain persona is a vessel for both Anhedönia’s storytelling and the listener’s own projections. “I sometimes get a little worried that my life is becoming a stage play with a bunch of characters, and I only exist as an actress to play them,” she told Vogue magazine in July last year. The lines are blurred, particularly when it comes to spirituality: a strict Christian upbringing, which both broke and made the character of Ethel, similarly defined Anhedönia’s real childhood: she is trans, and was sent to religious therapy at age 12 after telling her mother she was gay. Though she no longer considers herself a Christian, she has, unlike many queer people of a similar background, chosen to remain living in a small, conservative community – in Alabama, close to her native Florida. It’s not method acting, exactly, but it does give her a certain connection to the world she’s trying to paint that wouldn’t be there had she hotfooted it to LA or Nashville as soon as she could.

Cain’s style of Americana is profoundly evocative, subversive and escapist. Her vocals are strikingly similar to Lana Del Rey’s, with less slick production: a muted drawl that delivers tragedy with nonchalance and at times breaks with feeling. “Housofpsychoticwomn”, the third track on Perverts, has a repeated ambient sample that first conjures a washing machine going round and round, then a dog barking, then a very distant siren, before a distorted, repeated “I love you”, and a shuddering bass drone that kicks in after 12 and a half minutes. It’s a little harder work than, for example, Del Rey’s “Venice Bitch”, but the feelings are the same: isolation, flat horizons, the clash of tradition and modernity, somehow a kind of inherent gendered conservatism that is both parodied and indulged. On Preacher’s Daughter that key sense of outsiderdom – Ethel having broken free of the structures she grew up in, now in dangerous relationships and staggering towards martyrdom – felt like it was being readily expressed from within her. On Perverts, that internal Wild West becomes more literal: it feels as though we are at the eye of the storm, in a battered house surrounded by intense weather.

Perhaps this visceral listening experience is a deliberate attempt to undercut the romanticisingof Preacher’s Daughter, which led to young fans fantasising online about Bible camp. In October 2024, Cain posted on Tumblr that she was sick of online irony: that “nobody takes anything f***ing seriously any more… I am constantly bombarded by jokes… I feel like no matter what I make or what I do, it will always get turned into a f***ing joke.” She’s touching on the fact that the flipside of all this heavy imagery is that it is ripe for reproduction and parody, turned into a meme or a punchline. Perverts contains only a couple of accessible tracks that provide a welcome respite from sounds that are very serious indeed, and seems to lean in to a darkness that is impossible to mock.

The EP is an antidote, too, to the churn of an industry Cain seems uninterested in indulging. Like many of her generation she is politically outspoken, sometimes outrageously so: she has expressed support online for Palestine but also for Luigi Mangione, the 26-year-old suspected of killing the US healthcare CEO Brian Thompson in December, and in May last year called for Joe Biden to be assassinated following a US arms deal with Israel. But she’s not doing any of it for the algorithm: the sheer length of this “EP” makes a powerful statement on that (compare it to, for example, Sabrina Carpenter’s 2024 album Short and Sweet, whose 12 tracks ran to a grand total of 35 minutes). Unless someone wants to invent a “dronecore” TikTok trend, Perverts seems unlikely to be clipped up for viral videos. Of course, that Cain is not cut like other pop artists, that she seems not to care, that she’s committed to her work and that her work just happens to have a Gothic, nostalgic, godly aesthetic, is all part of her cult appeal.

So are we witnessing a rejection or an embrace of present culture? As it has always been the case with Ethel Cain, it’s not quite clear. That’s what makes her very contemporary – and special – indeed.

Emily Bootle is a commissioning editor and culture writer at the i Paper

Ethel Cain’s EP “Perverts” is on Daughters of Cain records