Ethel Cain confirms new project Perverts due 1/8, "Punish" debuts today with video

ETHEL CAIN CONFIRMS NEW PROJECT PERVERTS SET FOR RELEASE JANUARY 8, 2025 “PUNISH” DEBUTS TODAY WITH MUSIC VIDEO Photo credit Silken Weinberg; “Punish” debuts today—listen here and watch the music video, directed by Cain and Silken Weinberg, here. “I wonder how deep shame can run, and how unforgivable an act could be that I may still justify it in some bent way to make carrying it more bearable,” says Cain. “Would I tell myself it’s not my fault and I couldn’t help myself? Would anyone truly believe that? Would I?” Cain’s first body of work since her groundbreaking debut album Preacher’s Daughter, the 90 minutes of music on Perverts explores Cain’s furthest afield inspirations and sonic negative space, mining drone, noise, slowcore, ambient and beyond. Cain wrote, produced and recorded the project between Coraopolis, PA and Tallahassee, FL over the past year. Cain writes of the project: The Consequence of Audience As I went there through the long, long wood, I felt no-thing and I was no-thing 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 no-thing. To know if I did go completely naked into the theater of the divine. If I did need for no-thing, want for no-thing. 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 every-body. Ethel Cain is the creation of Florida-born multidisciplinary artist Hayden Anhedönia. After years spent teaching herself to produce at home in the Florida panhandle and releasing various projects, Cain moved to Indiana and singlehandedly wrote, produced and mixed her acclaimed 2021 EP Inbred from the basement of the old church where she lived.  Cain’s debut album Preacher’s Daughter, a multimedia work that took more than four years to assemble, was released in May 2022 to praise from The New York Times, NPR, Vogue, W Magazine, V Magazine and more, with many critics naming the album one of the best of the year. Cain has spent the years since playing sold out shows and packed festival sets around the world; walking in New York and Paris fashion weeks and collaborating with Givenchy, Miu Miu and Calvin Klein; and collaborating and sharing stages with Florence + the Machine, Mitski and more.  “Punish” single artwork. Artwork by Ethel Cain, photo credit Silken Weinberg;