Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.When we last encountered Ethel Cain on an album, she was being killed and eaten by a psychopathic lover. That is the gory ending of the US indie star’s Preacher’s Daughter, released to cult acclaim in 2022. It is a concept album about religious ardour, sexual abuse and sadomasochism. The plot is cooked at full gas with the gamiest Southern Gothic ingredients. But the songs are less melodramatic. They unfold in the hazy, seductively stylised fashion of Lana Del Rey.Cain is the biblically named alter ego of Hayden Silas Anhedönia. She is, in Anhedönia’s words, “kind of my dark, evil twin”, a character with a wardrobe of white Victorian dresses whose back story maps very loosely on to her creator’s life. Anhedönia also grew up in a fervently religious Christian household in the American south. Raised in Florida, she came out publicly as a trans woman in 2018 when she was 20, after which she legally changed her last name to Anhedönia. Summoning up the jaded protagonist of a 19th-century decadent novel, it means an inability to feel pleasure.Perverts is not intended as a follow-up to Preacher’s Daughter. Although released under Ethel Cain’s name, it does not continue with Cain’s grisly narrative. Instead, the record amplifies the earlier album’s indebtedness to horror films. (Preacher’s Daughter was initially conceived as a screenplay.)The nine tracks last almost 90 minutes, an unwieldy duration for an album but standard in cinema. Spookily distorted voices utter fright-flick phrases like “It’s happening to everybody”. A 15-minute-long track called “Pulldrone” has an occult voiceover about fallen angels and degradation, which gives way to claustrophobic droning sounds that press remorselessly upon us. The uncanny hum and strange vocal noises on the title track resemble the sound design of a David Lynch film.Interspersed among these non-songs are a series of more conventional numbers. “Punish” reverts to Lana Del Rey mode with breathy singing and a fabulously doomy guitar riff that rolls in like a bad omen. “Vacillator” takes place as though at the edge of sleep with murmured crooning and reverb-treated shuffle drums. Themes of transgression and death flicker in and out of focus. Perverts does not invite repeat visits. But its eerie atmosphere is gripping. True to the horror genre, it captures the perverse pleasure we take in being unsettled. ★★★★☆‘Perverts’ is released by Daughters of Cain
