Let Ethel Cain's Defiance Guide You Through 2025

The day after the 2024 election, singer-songwriter Ethel Cain shared her thoughts on the results online. Her Tumblr post and subsequent Instagram Stories became one of the most widely shared reactions to Donald Trump’s reelection, getting picked up by outlets like Rolling Stone and Billboard and viral X (formerly Twitter) accounts like @PopCrave and @PopBase.

“If you voted for Trump, I hope that peace never finds you. Instead, I hope clarity strikes you someday like a cap of lighting,” she wrote on Tumblr (in the since-deleted post), resonating with the tens of thousands who liked screengrabs of her words on X and Instagram. Though the indie musician called the U.S. a “loveless, disrespectful” nation when she continued her statement on Instagram, she ultimately concluded with a call to action: “This is still your country too,” she wrote, encouraging her followers to exchange the value of American individualism for community organizing.

As we settle into 2025 and a precarious moment in U.S. politics, Ethel Cain is the kind of artist many of us can look to. Defiance exists in every fabric of the Florida-bred-Alabama-based singer’s work, from the stirring essays she self-publishes to her new music that’s caught many of her fans off guard. Seeing that unbridled resistance in someone who somewhat unintentionally became a minor pop star in the past few years, especially as many feel preemptively exhausted by the year ahead, is an inspiration.

On January 8, Ethel Cain, whose real name is Hayden Anhedönia, released Perverts, her first follow-up project to her acclaimed, debut album, 2022’s Preacher’s Daughter. The goth-folk-rock LP and its breakout pseudo-pop-song single “American Teenager” turned her into an indie phenomenon, just three years after Anhedönia began focusing on the Ethel Cain stage persona and sound, as opposed to her other side projects. (Anhedönia, who is trans, got her musical start singing in a Tallahassee, Florida Southern Baptist church where her father was a deacon, though she and her family have since left the church.)

Perverts was arguably 2025’s first most-anticipated record, questionably arriving on a Wednesday rather than New Release Friday, and was shrouded in secrecy, with the 26-year-old singer doing little promotion around it, save for sharing her candid Tumblr musings and Midwest-inspired images on Instagram. Not even minutes after the project dropped on streaming, fans created a meme about how “scared” they were listening to it, or how it sounded like taking part in a seance; because aside from a few songs, Perverts is almost exclusively eerie, ambient music. It features the 13-and-a-half-minute “Housofpsychoticwomn,” in which she repeats “I love you” to the point of deliriousness, the 15-minute Biblical spoken word number, “Pulldrone,” and “Onanist,” which sounds like a horror movie final girl’s climatic scene against the film’s score. So, it’s largely a far cry from her debut, except for songs like “Punish,” “Vacillator,” and “Amber Waves.”

As Cain has said, she released Perverts because she “just really [likes] drone music and wanted to make some.” Longtime “Daughters of Cain,” or what her fanbase is called, know this to be true; years before the Ethel Cain moniker blew up, Anhedönia released drone music on Soundcloud and Preacher’s Daughter has plenty of largely instrumental tracks with long runtimes. But there’s something admirable about an artist being so utterly unflinching in their artistry. It’s hard to say if she really did just wanted to satisfy herself creatively or wanted to continue exploring Preacher’s Daughter’s themes of religion’s detriments, and what it might sound like to turn away from the light and into the darker sides of one’s self—or if the project was in some ways a reaction to her rapid ascension (from feeling misunderstood when she ended up on Barack Obama’s yearly favorite songs list to urging her fans to be more respectful at shows). But it is defiant, and does what few do so unabashedly in the current pop culture landscape.

Facets of Americana, nostalgia, and faith, particularly of the Southern Gothic, midcentury Midwestern, and Christian variety, have been a part of Ethel Cain’s work since the beginning. Perverts’ opening and title track even begins with a version of one of her favorite hymnals, "Nearer, My God, To Thee,” before it devolves into ominous tones. Her work varies between earnest, homage, and pastiche, but it’s almost as if the flag hung high on wood-paneled walls in her promotional imagery indicates her fascination with, or disdain for, how America’s most ostracized or vulnerable need to find their own salvation, especially when its traditional values like faith and the family may not save you.

In mid-January, Ethel Cain made her TV debut. No, she didn’t get behind a piano or synthesizer to play a track of Perverts on The Tonight Show. She was the subject of a segment on Fox News, during which conservative pundits criticized “the popular singer among Gen Z” for one of her Instagram Stories. In the since-expired post, she reshared a quote from U.S. Secretary of Labor Robert Reich that reads, “Money in politics is the root of our dysfunction,” adding the hashtag #KillMoreCEOs, and sharing additional slides saying, “corporations giggle at protesting,” and, “the world is burning it’s very clear who’s holding the matches.” Fox News criticized her take, suggesting her listeners “boycott” her and tell her, “This is not who we are as Americans.”

But one could argue that defiance has been an American tradition since its beginnings. Whether Ethel Cain’s opinions are “right” or “wrong” is beside the point: Her commitment to standing firm in her beliefs and artistic choices, and encouraging radical collective action, or at least engaging with what's happening in the world, rather than complacency, is what we should take away. (Of course, she’s hardly the first pop star to speak out—many have been drawn to fellow Gen Z star Chappell Roan’s honesty and advocacy for the LGBTQ+ community, and superstars like Beyoncé have entrenched their artwork with identity politics for decades.)

Along with Perverts, the indie star shared a short story and a statement. In the latter, which reads like an instruction to her fans, she says, “Poke a hole in yourself and see what comes out.” Like casting a spell, she iterates what to do next, noting that one could retreat into isolation to retain “freedom of action,” but so too “does the world retain freedom of retaliation.” She adds, “You can do whatever you want if you can handle the return,” noting how “it’s ok to be weak.”

It’s as if she’s calling fans to be as daring as she is in releasing Perverts and not fear what happens next, in more ways than one. So even if you struggle revisiting Perverts, pledge allegiance to what it represents going into this unforeseeable year.