The discography of Hayden Anhedönia — or better known by her stage name, Ethel Cain — stinks of heavy, humid days that smell like mosquito spray. It looks like dust-colored dog-run houses, ghost towns flanked by farmlands and billboards that preach “Hell is Real.”
These places and landscapes depicted through Cain’s discography are reminiscent of her childhood. She grew up in a small town in Florida, with a father who was the deacon of a Southern Baptist Church.
Cain has referenced her unique background through albums about cannibalism and religiously disaffected runaway daughters. And in a recent post Tumblr — a social media platform — she wrote about the psyches of sex offenders that inspired her next album, aptly titled Perverts.
On Nov. 4, Ethel Cain released the first single off of her new album: “Punish.” It’s a sparse funeral chant inspired by the story of Jeffery Doucet, a pedophile who the father of his victim shot, she wrote in the Tumblr post.
This song and her newest project, Perverts, seem to respond to her last album, Preacher’s Daughter, being “TikTokified” — meaning a wave of popularity surrounding an artist’s aesthetic leads to jokes on TikTok. Specifically, a sound on the platform went viral in which users asked if a girl was wearing a camo hoodie in an “Ethel Cain vinyl way, or a Republican way.”
Songs from Preacher’s Daughter were mixed with pop songs, showed up on President Barack Obama’s favorite music of 2022 list and were included in the movie adaption of It Ends with Us.
In a now-deleted Tumblr post, Cain voiced her request that fans engage with her music more seriously. It seems taking a darker, more experimental approach is the way she’s dissuading the irony surrounding her persona.
Cain is one of many artists who have taken to social media to express their distaste for the way people interact with the artists they’re fans of.
Similarly to Cain, Chappell Roan — who had a meteoric rise to fame after her hit song “Good Luck, Babe” and her performances, at festivals like Governor’s Ball and Coachella — said in a pair of TikTok videos that the way some of her fans interact with her is “abusive.”
After Roan came out and talked about her negative experiences with fans and the parasocial relationship they have with her, artists like Lady Gaga, Lorde, Mitski and others came out in support of her. Some, like Hayley Williams of Paramore, also shared their own negative experiences online.
Even though musicians — especially female musicians — have always been the targets of fans crossing boundaries and not taking their work seriously, Cain said this “age of irony” is new.
“There is such a loss of sincerity and everything has to be a joke at all times,” Cain wrote in the deleted Tumblr post.
The darkness present in the song“Punish” that will be present throughout Perverts isn’tnew to Cain’s discography, but I think it lacks the pop element that often hid the darker messages of Preacher’s Daughter. I think this was done on purpose.
I’ve been a fan of Cain since her last EP — Inbred — whose pop songs like “Crush” or “Michelle Pfeiffer” remind me of driving through rural Texas to my parent’s place in the country. Her darker songs of the album like the title single Inbred drew me into the world she created.
But I truly fell in love with her work after Preacher’s Daughter was released.
I listened to the album my first time coming home from college. The bus to the airport drove through Amish country, pausing at biblical town signs, white chapels with cross spires, Revolutionary War era snow-covered, graveyards and rolling hills covered in gray trees with spindly, naked branches. The album has themes of leaving home, betrayal and loneliness.
As a college student experiencing life without her parents and childhood friends for the first time, I felt understood.
“Punish” has this same quality. Cain can capture the general in the particular, which is what makes her work so rich.
Every lyric of “Punish” drips with shame. The lyrics throughout tell the story of someone committing heinous acts because “nature chews on me,” refers to the death of the protagonist and desire. The suffering the protagonist is experiencing is both self-inflicted and caused by powers greater than them, like God and society.
The dream-like production and lyrics are specific to the story she’s telling while also allowing people to take what they need from it.
The stripped-back nature of “Punish” removes any pretense that this was made for a large audience. Hayden Anhedönia killed Ethel Cain the pop star, but the people that love Ethel Cain will love “Punish.”
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