Ethel Cain announces new project ‘Perverts’
Two years after her critically acclaimed debut album, Ethel Cain has announced that her long-awaited new EP project, Perverts, will be released on January 8th, 2025.
Since 2017, Ethel Cain, real name Hayden Silas Anhedönia, has been building a cultish following. It began with online demos initially released on Soundcloud or Bandcamp before her early EPs Carpet Bed, Golden Age, and Inbred brought more and more attention to her gothic sounds and sharp storytelling.
It was on these early EPs that she began to craft the character of Ethel Cain, a young girl born in a small, heavily religious town as the daughter of their strict preacher. On her 2022 debut album, Preacher’s Daughter, she tells the whole story as the album serves as a concept album, following the character from her first heartbreak to her gruesome death.
Upon its release, Preacher’s Daughter, and especially the track ‘American Teenager’, boomed the artist out of her cultish statement and into wider acclaim. In the years that have passed since, her following has only grown due to connections with Boygenius, Mitski and Florence and the Machine.
However, since her debut album, people have been fascinated by what she will do next. At the end of Preacher’s Daughter, Ethel Cain dies. Hayden Silas Anhedönia has always been clear about the separation between herself and this character, so fans have wondered what the next stage of her music will look and sound like or how it will interact with the character of her debut.
Now, we’re close to finding out as she has announced her hotly anticipated second project, Perverts. There’s quite a wait for the full EP released in January 2025, but the first single from the record, titled ‘Punish’, arrives on November 1st, 2024, as the first teaser of what is to come.
While people have theorised that Anhedönia’s second effort would be called Preacher’s Wife and dive into the story of Cain’s mother or even grandmother, it’s clear that she’s had this title set for a while. On her recent tour, her merch said “Pervert” in gothic, scrawling writing. That, paired with the release’s eerie black and white artwork, seems to suggest that the upcoming record will still have horror elements to it.
People who attended her recent tour will already have had a teaser of the live version of the opening track ‘Punish’. Alongside other unreleased track that she performed, called ‘Amber Waves’, ‘Punish’ was cinematic and more ambient than anything heard from the artist before as she invited her crowd to stay still and silent and let the songs “move through” them.
With so much unknown currently, there is plenty of time for the energy and possible story of Perverts to reveal itself over the coming months. But for Ethel Cain fans, after a long wait since her debut, this is the news they’ve been waiting for.
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