Last month, Ethel Cain announced her new project Pervertthe highly anticipated sequel to its massive 2022 debut Pastor’s Daughter. Today, she unveils the first single “Punish”.

“I wonder how deep the shame can be and how unforgivable an act can be that I can still justify it in a roundabout way to make it more bearable,” Cain says in the press release. “Would I tell myself that it’s not my fault and that I can’t help it? Would anyone really believe that? Would I do it?

Cain specifies that Pervert is not an album, even if it lasts 90 minutes. It explores the buzzing ambient sound that gave Pastor’s Daughter a captivating and disturbing edge. She wrote, produced and recorded it between Coraopolis, PA and Tallahassee, FL over the past year. Here’s what she said:

The public’s consequence

As I went there through the very long woods, I felt nothing and I was nothing and I was at ease. The gray ash trees and their mottled plumage were one, curving and branching to form a ceiling above. There was a wide separation between the trunks, creating vast corridors extending in all directions in front of me, behind me, all around me. O, what praises could I sing of this endless twilight autumn which I passed among these oaks! No one accompanied me, no one met me, because I was alone and I was comfortable. Yet the day the trees broke, the corridor ended and I was thrown onto the rocky expanse that was the Great Darkness. There, I saw a first face and heard footsteps, rare, but I was no longer alone. It was a shameful act to carry those two bare hands as they clenched violently, now fully visible for all to see. I had never seen them in the woods, because I was at ease. Here the taut skin seemed to stretch and sweat, almost glowing, as if exasperated by its own grip. For as I wandered through the Great Darkness, there was only barren gray rock as far as the eye could see. This made an observer a passerby. I saw them pass painfully, fingers plunged into their open mouths desperate for moisture, tongues hanging out. There, in the woods, I was the lookout, but here, I only move the air. Yet, in the stifling labor of my apathy, I had heard the bell. A whisper of God between their smooth, bent fingers ruffled the hair on the back of my neck. My muscles groaned under the weight of the skin around them, wanting to release.

Suddenly I saw, from where I was standing, a large dome on top of a hill on the horizon in front of me. Yes, I saw it with my own eyes! The white exterior stared back at me with flat holes obscured by mist, barely distinguishable from the dark sky behind it, as if everyone beyond the dome was cut from the same slab, barely erased. The convex roof rested on a disk, supported by large Ionic pillars surrounding the temple. Steps radiated down the slope, like ripples in a pond escaping a fallen stone. It was bigger than life, bigger than wood, bigger than anything that filled that darkness, and my gullible joy was that it all belonged to me. Yes, all mine! They could follow me there, but they couldn’t follow me inside. My hands stretched outwards with an audible crack in the bone as I crawled forward.

I couldn’t tell you the rest. I wouldn’t even try, because it wouldn’t change anything. To find out if I actually entered the theater of the divine completely naked. If I didn’t need anything, I wouldn’t want anything. If I was then full to the brim, a cylindrical pull would slide through my gaping jaw to my endless throat. If I saw it there, sparkling through the veil like pearly oil on crystal clear water. If he heard me sing with every atom that formed me, through every orifice and wound I had, polytonal in my plea for him to complete me with the fifth. If he looked at me, I saw how much I needed to know what God knows and to be with him. If he answered me with flat dissonance, “How could you not?”

There would be no point in telling you these things. In which I was still brought back to the ground, even if below, untouched by my childish need to repeat myself and my mistakes. Who wouldn’t climb the wall to look over the edge? The cautionary tale is a foolish task, and I’m not a fool. I am like my hands; twisting on themselves and bursting at the seams. I cannot contain the pain of the sensation, just as I could not contain the sorrow as I fell, nor the agony as I crawled back to that rocky countryside, and lo! I’m on my way there again now. I am, I am, I am! But I won’t tell you the visceral details, since you already know them. You all do it.

It happens to everyone.

Watch the “Punish” video below, directed by Cain and Silken Weinberg.

Pervert came out 1/8.