TRIGGER WARNING!: This review discusses themes explored in Perverts, including abuse, religious trauma and paedophilia. Reader discretion is advised.
A friend recently recommended me “Create Dangerously” after I explained to them that I was struggling, once again, with public reactions to a work I’d spent three/four years making in private, stating the message of Albert Camus is that ‘artists must embrace the risks and responsibilities of creating authentic, bold, and socially meaningful work, even in the face of opposition or danger.’
Towards the end of 2023, Ethel Cain put out a personally curated Spotify playlist, ‘elephant hill’, which she allegedly played in intervals during shows, according to reddit.
And I remember listening on long journeys with ironclad, motorway backdrops, on the precipice of something big, a future that looked as grey and terrifying as the little tornado pictured in the square, knowing the life I’d built for myself was about to come crashing down, feeling ironically…soothed.
On my worst days, I could conclude that something is wrong with me for feeling soothed by what is effectively a Silent Hill soundtrack, but on my better days, I understand that music works best when it allows us to feel exactly what we already feel, when it becomes a vehicle for our own experiences to step into, and perhaps feel less alone in.
The subject matter of this album? No, I cannot relate to it. ‘Perverts’ was intended to be a concept album where Hayden “explored a different character that society considers a pervert on each song”.
As I now know that sometimes the obvious needs stating, I want to reassure my readers that I was not driving around feeling less alone in the experience of ‘being a pervert’. I’m sure some are, and that’s okay, too (although I’m unsure how I feel about the subject matter of ‘Punish’, I have to say. Read on to find out more).
No, I felt less alone in a musical sound-world that feels like a more accurate depiction of the bleakness of the world than most. I’m sure most people listening to Perverts know nothing of its backstory, only how it facilitates their own inner world while listening. My therapist recently said to me, quite wisely, ‘your music is there for others to feel something through it. Not for you to justify yourself through it’.
I found ‘Perverts’ soundtracking driving around London during my worst, most isolating month yet. There’s something in the air right now; I know multiple people in mental breakdowns, and I myself am contesting with, once again, my dear friend ‘homelessness’. This does feel like capitalism creaking to a holt now, and conflict will be rife as people panic and sink into various coping mechanisms and trauma responses. It’s not personal, it’s a sign of the times. And this music feels like a relief. Yes, a relief!
Anyway - back to elephant hill - in this youtube video released three months ago by Hayden, she states elephant hill is a place from her past, where during one photoshoot (in which of course they were going to dig a hole and plant a cross in the ground), she and her friends experienced a little paranormal activity; a figure of a man gliding towards them, to return the next day and find disembodied and bloodied deer legs. Hm.
Perhaps this paranormal activity inspired Hayden to open ‘Perverts’ with ‘nearer my god to thee’, a hymn about Jacob’s ladder, a staircase to heaven. The voice splits into harmony with some kind of formant effect on each one, perhaps a ring modulator?
‘Heaven has forsaken the masturbator’, the narrator tells us. ‘No one you know is a good person’.
‘It’s happening to everybody’, and then the track ends, the stairs ripped from the sky. We are shown an opening to heaven, only to come crashing down to the floor in glorious monochrome.
On the road, the opening sounds in ‘Punish’ sounded deceptively like cars passing by, wheels about to fly off into oblivion. It took a while for me to notice they were, in fact, inside my car, and the track - I love it when artists use ‘abstraction’, the process of turning sounds into something existing in a liminal space, other-worldly, almost un-human. I wonder how she made them. ‘Punish’ is Hayden’s only attempt on the record at a traditional, semi-commercial song, and she of course made it about a paedophile.
A paedophile who “was shot by the child’s father and now lives in exile where he physically maims himself to simulate the bullet wound in order to punish himself.”
But don’t worry, the song can be ‘whatever you want it to be’.
In “Housofpsychoticwomn,” a voice repeats “I love you” to the sound of a clock ticking, repelling even the most anxiously attached. When asked on tumblr about the title, Hayden said, “kier-la janisse wrote a wonderful book by that title. i had been reading it the week i recorded the song and it just felt apt at the time. i felt wrong to change it when i decided to include it on the project.” I love it when artists leave the demo name as the actual name. Another Sky lovingly named a song ‘Bong’.
Vacillator is a beautiful lullaby, the drums and guitar reminiscent of that record by Cigarettes After Sex recorded in a stairwell, asking, “if you love me, then keep it to yourself”. Is a ‘vacillator’ a pervert? Unsure. In attachment theory, a ‘vacillator’ was described by Jousline Savra in this way;
“Dating is intense for Vacillators, and as time goes by, the excitement and intensity wears out and the reality sets in. The Vacillator begins to feel disappointed, rejected, and frustrated in certain situations. They tell themselves a story about their partner and their relationships. As a result, they have expectations not being met in their marriage or relationships, which leads to feeling hurt, resulting in many Vacillators responding in anger.”
During Onanist, a voice apathetically and submissively says, ‘it feels good’ over and over - supposedly inspired by the tale of Onan (38:9-10), a king who ‘wasted’ his semen on the ground rather than impregnating his dead brother’s widow, ultimately being killed, cast to Hell for disregarding the demands of God. Nice!
Pulldrone begins with a monologue and sinks into 15 minutes of pure drone bliss, supposedly a nod to Douglas Darden’s ‘condemned buildings’, who used this title to convey ideas that may not fit into the canon of acceptable work. The buildings run parallel to Hayden’s concept for the album; outcasts, essentially. Pervert’s original narrative was supposed to surround a man who was psychosexually infatuated by power plants. On November 24th, 2024, Hayden made a post to her Tumblr and Instagram about the defunct Bruce Mansfield power plant in Shippingport, PA:
One year ago today, I accidentally discovered the defunct Bruce Mansfield plant in Shippingport, PA on a late night drive along the Ohio river while I was living in Coraopolis. Lights on the horizon from the bridge in Monaca led to “smoke” from cooling towers on the other side of the hill until I had followed the backroads all the way to what now sits in my mind as nothing short of a monument to God. I’ve always had a fascination with great brutalist structures, but something about the smokestacks, cooling towers, and other twisted entrails of the power plants of Pennsylvania truly changed the way I see the world and my place in it last year. I spent multiple nights a week parked on the side of the road outside that plant the entire 9 months I lived in Coraopolis; I’d drive up the river in the middle of the night and sit there for hours, admiring the sheer might of the towers and how beautiful and resolute they stood against the grey night sky. They became a beacon of religiosity, of sexual liberation and enjoyment, of contentedness. When I would drive home, I would masturbate in the dark and think about them and only them. I think I miss the power plants more than anything since leaving Pennsylvania. Perverts wouldn’t exist without Bruce Mansfield and neither would the person I am today. Happy 1 year anniversary to me and my giant concrete boyfriend ♡”
And Etienne? I ‘pulled’ this quote from genius lyrics, ha! (it’s late. It’s 1am. I want to send this out tomorrow), where you will find more details about this album than any review, dedicatedly and meticulously researched by fans;
Etienne is about Étienne-Louis Boullée, an 18th century French architect renowned for his rather dystopian design aimed to invoke ‘changes in social value’. The track is probably more specifically in reference to the conceptualisation of the architectural marvel, the Cenotaph, designed by Boullée in memorium for Sir Isaac Newton.
Alike to the ring iconography depicted in the photo material from the ‘Perverts’ shoot; the ring follows the same spherical structure and patterning as that of the cenotaph, which, in the eyes of Boullée’s studies, namely that of the ‘Theory of Bodies’, sees the sphere as the “the most beautiful and perfect natural body”
The light emanating from within the cenotaph, a light of one’s ‘true self’, may also have been an architectural nod to Plato’s allegory of The Cave, where prisoners are chained inside a cave, only able to see shadows on the wall. These shadows represent empirical evidence and the limited understanding of reality. The allegory serves as a metaphor for the difference between belief and true knowledge.”
Thatorchia is perhaps my favourite on the record. I’m a sucker for guitar feedback, but this track took it to a new level. It felt like I was about to soar through my windscreen and into the grey bleakness, full of acceptance of this brave new world of tiktok super-state rows, and 100/1000 men competitions, and rage-bait, and what feels like Adam Curtis’ hyper-normalisation coming to light in full force.
So note my surprise when I read that during Ethel Cain’s appearance on NTS Radio, she said of the title’s meaning:
“Thatorchia is a word that popped into my head and i couldn’t stop thinking about it. this is the definition i wrote down for it ‘thatorchia: the bitter acceptance of the knowledge that god will let you near but he won’t let you stay”.
Try as I might, I will always be a mortal driving a car. Better stay inside that windscreen.
Supposedly about ‘the divine theatre’, a concept depicting the idea that life is a divine play, with each person playing a part in the grand show, the record finishes with Amber Waves, a reference to the line, ‘for amber waves of grain’, sung by Katherine Lee Bates in her 1895 anthem ”America the Beautiful”.
(don’t think there’s an original rendition on youtube - have Mariah Carey, instead)
The song is a tribute to the natural beauty, history, and values of the United States, apt for Hayden’s childhood in the south of America, one that has influenced all her work to this day. Fans dedicatedly scribing on Genius lyrics, the fountain of all knowledge, believe ‘Amber Waves’ is about each perverts’ “fixation on the euphoria given by the divine theatre, craving it so much that they resort to the cycle of addiction to find it once more.”
Overall, the record was made ‘because I wanted to make a drone record’, and that is the only justification an artist needs to make a masterpiece. It reminds me of The Antler’s ‘Hospice’, a similarly bleak concept album about the story of a relationship between a hospice worker and a female patient suffering from terminal bone cancer, their ensuing romance, and their slow downward spiral as a result of the woman's traumas, fears, and disease. How much was auto-biographical? We never knew.
And once again, this album feels like a storytelling process of catharsis for Hayden.
A beautifully written pitchfork review speaks of her first record focusing on the tribulations of a disturbed nuclear family, and her second, ‘Perverts’, focussing on the relationship to the self, stating, ‘she discards the impulse to soar out of darkness and opens her mouth to let it in instead.’
The album in itself isn’t a political statement, but I appreciate artists who exist seemingly both in and out of the system - I saw Ethel Cain at the Roundhouse, earlier in 2024. It was wholly a mainstream experience, with American Teenager popping off as an encore, so I wonder how she is going to translate this album live. I love artists unafraid to offend who, in the process, create underdog records that while they may initially intend to alienate audiences, end up ironically winning everyone over instead. Perhaps deep down, we all feel like the underdog.
For me, it’s not that I can relate to being a pervert per say, but it’s that I can relate to being on the outside of something, looking in.
“But art, because of the inherent freedom that is its very essence, as I have tried to explain, unites, wherever tyranny divides. So how could it be surprising that art is the chosen enemy of every kind of oppression? How could it be surprising that artists and intellectuals are the primary victims of modern tyrannies, whether they are right-wing or left-wing? Tyrants know that great works embody a force for emancipation that is only mysterious to those who do not worship art. Every great work of art makes humanity richer and more admirable, and that is its only secret. And even thousands of concentration camps and prison cells cannot obliterate this deeply moving testimony to dignity.”
- Create Dangerously, Albert Camus