Ethel Cain: “Punish” Track Review

“It’s no real pleasure in life,” says a man known as The Misfit who’s just killed a Christian family in Flannery O’Connor’s short story, A Good Man Is Hard to Find. The man, a famous escaped convict, calls himself The Misfit because he can’t see what he’s done to be punished as he’s been. “Does it seem right to you, lady,” he asks the pious grandmother, “that one is punished a heap and another ain’t punished at all?” The woman calls to Jesus; the Misfit shoots her in the chest.

I like to borrow O’Connor’s term “Christ-haunted” to describe the music of Ethel Cain, the stage name of Hayden Anhedönia, who is often called a pop star, though you wouldn’t know that from her songs. Besides “American Teenager,” an “anti-patriotism fake pop song” that found its way to Barack Obama’s Best of 2022 playlist, her songs are doomed and dirge-like, preoccupied by fate. “I am punished by love,” Cain sings plainly on “Punish,” the first single from her forthcoming project, Perverts, which, at over nearly seven minutes, invokes angels and murderers, channeling the piano drone of Ruins-era Grouper and Midwife’s doleful so-described “heaven metal.”

“Words mean nothing anymore,” Cain wrote recently in a Tumblr post she’s since deleted. The post identified a crisis of sincerity, an unwillingness to earnestly engage with art without using the language of irony and memes. If certain moments on Preacher’s Daughter seemed to mesmerize the mainstream, “Punish” is Anhedönia embodying her name—an almost cruelly gorgeous word for the inability to feel pleasure, a word that seems to spite you for how good it feels to say.