In 2023, the Guardian interviewed Hayden Anhedönia, who records as Ethel Cain. She was, in theory, riding high on the critical success of her self-released debut album, Preacher’s Daughter, and the cult following that sprung up in its wake, entranced by its macabre lyrics, drifting, gothy sound – Lana Del Rey if she had ameliorated her latest bad-boyfriend woes by listening to the Cocteau Twins and sundry shoegazing bands – and Anhedönia’s strikingly unfiltered image. A sometime model, she has the names of both the angel Gabriel and a demon from various apocryphal Jewish and Islamic texts tattooed across her forehead, has talked openly about being trans and autistic, and is given to hair-raising social media posts in which she has variously called for the assassination of Joe Biden, armed insurrection in America and, most recently, the release of Luigi Mangione, the chief suspect in the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.
And yet, Anhedönia did not seem to be riding high in 2023. She protested at length about both the scale of her success, her popularity on social media and the intrusive nature of her most obsessive fans: complaints we’ve heard again and again from female artists including Mitski and Chappell Roan. She talked about wishing she “had a much smaller fanbase” and wasn’t viewed as a pop star, even an alt-pop star.
It’s hard not to think about those sentiments when confronted with Anhedönia’s first major release since Preacher’s Daughter. Presented as an interstitial nine-track project rather than an actual follow-up, it nevertheless lasts the best part of 90 minutes, and carries a distinct hint of: how do you like me now?
It essentially contains two kinds of track. The first, including single Punish and closer Amber Waves, feel like the music on Preacher’s Daughter falling to pieces, their sound muffled and lo-fi, their structure stripped back to simple piano figures that repeat for the entirety of the song, their tempo slowed to an agonising crawl. On Punish, the whole song is eventually consumed by an electric guitar so distorted the chords are besides the point; it’s essentially a wall of obliterating noise. Vacillator is one of the few tracks to feature drums – it has a beautiful melody, but the actual music seems to be made up of ghostly echoes of instruments rather than instruments themselves, the sonic equivalent of seeing a vapour trail but not the plane that made them. Etienne dispenses with vocals entirely, leaving a glacial figure played on an out-of-tune piano, the overall sound vaguely recalling the late Daniel Johnston’s early home recordings.
If this was Perverts’ main currency, it would still represent a dramatic shift, but the majority of its running time is taken up by lengthy tracks that sound remarkably like they could have been released on a tiny cassette label in the early 80s, part of the deep underground wave of esoteric post-industrial music effectively spawned in part by Throbbing Gristle. These tracks vaguely resemble the work of artists in the notoriously confrontational microgenre of power electronics, in those moments when its creators were intent on merely giving listeners the creeps rather than terrorising them. Sounds akin to pink noise churn and hiss in the background; atonal synths and feedback intermittently blast and howl, drone and scrape, low in the mix; Anhedönia’s spoken word vocals are usually rendered incomprehensible with effects and distortion. When they aren’t, you rather wish they were: “Masturbator,” she keeps repeating on the 12-minute title track. An atmosphere of oppressive, unsettling gloom is very effectively conjured.
It goes without saying that you don’t settle down to review the new release by an artist last spotted in the UK on a London day festival bill majoring in bedroom pop – with Mitski, Beabadoobee and TV Girl among its teen-friendly delights – expecting to mention the early 80s post-industrial underground. But perhaps that’s the point. If Anhedönia was looking to scale down her fanbase, perhaps by ridding herself of the devotees who call her “mother”, then putting out music that invites that comparison is probably a useful way of doing it: you wonder what the fans eagerly attempting to decipher its track titles on message boards are going to make of it.
Perhaps nothing. The majority of listeners will hear Perverts via streaming, which militates against listening to albums in toto, and not everything here is completely divorced from beat, melody and structure: you could, at a pinch, imagine Vacillator or Amber Waves soundtracking TikTok memes, the way the contents of Preacher’s Daughter did. Still, it serves notice that Hayden Anhedönia is made of noticeably different stuff than her peers, as if that was in doubt.
Perverts is released on 8 January
This week Alexis listened to
Pet Shop Boys – New London Boy (Boy Harsher Rremix)
The dead period between Christmas and the new year gives you time to catch up on tracks you missed via friends’ end-of-year lists, hence this fantastic remix which succeeds in sounding more like imperial phase PSBs than the original.
Source: theguardian.com
