The Daily Spin II
Ethel Cain | Perverts
Welcome back to the Daily Spin. For the uninitiated, this is the series in which I review an album every day of 2025.
As was the case two years ago, my favorite song from each album can be found at the playlist linked here.
Album: Perverts (2025)
Artist: Ethel Cain
Link:
The best way I can describe Perverts is this - an eighty-nine minute groan.
Granted, this is drone music, so somewhat expected, and even more so considering Cain’s attitude - what is this album if not the bleeding edges alluded to in Preacher’s Daughter? Where that album had substance, though, it feels as though this album just gapes, an open maw. Maybe that’s the effect aimed for, but I feel it’s been better done elsewhere.
Drone is intrinsically not the friendliest genre. This sort of dark ambience doesn’t really work to just casually throw on with the homies, and it’s not like I’m gonna drive to work with this blaring - my brain takes care of that, thank you very much.
Despite this - and maybe because of it - Perverts is so hard to slog through that it becomes really deeply unenjoyable after a while. If this is a commentary on life, that’s fair and felt, but it only works as music when you’ve got something else behind it. A lot of these tracks reminded me of Lorn songs or movie scores, but Lorn uses a marching band’s worth of percussion to drive the moment and a movie score has the emotive pulls that this is trying to evoke built in. It just doesn’t really work here.
Rating: 3/10
Best Tracks: Vacillator
Worst Tracks: Housofpsychoticwomn