Around the time of her big break with 2022’s Preacher’s Daughter, Ethel Cain was dubbed a pop star, though it was often hard to tell from her songs. Aside from “American Teenager”, a Springsteen-esque anthem that laundered sneakily unpatriotic sentiments through arena-ready melodies, that album’s songs were largely dirges (gorgeous ones, at that) preoccupied by ideas of doomed love, faith and fate. Written and produced almost entirely by Cain (the stage name and alter ego of Hayden Anhedönia), the project’s lore was nearly as compelling as the music itself, launching Anhedönia into something like stardom. Since then, Anhedönia’s spoken freely about the pitfalls of popularity; she penned a Tumblr post last year identifying an irony epidemic within online fan culture: an aversion to approaching art with sincerity rather than memes. You could be tempted to view Perverts, Cain’s first release since Preacher’s Daughter, as a provocation—an often-challenging 90-minute work that seems designed to scare off a stan or two. Songs like “Pulldrone” and “Housofpsychoticwomn” are noise experiments that stretch well past the 10-minute mark, full of eerie drone, depersonalised spoken word and terrifying imagery regarding sex and sin. The moments of hard-earned beauty feel all the more rewarding: the fuzzy, sultry “Vacillator”, or “Etienne” and “Thatorchia”, a pair of elegiac instrumentals that sound like beams of heavenly light piercing through the darkness.