“It’s no actual pleasure in life,” says a person referred to as The Misfit who’s simply killed a Christian household in Flannery O’Connor’s brief story, A Good Man Is Exhausting to Discover. The person, a well-known escaped convict, calls himself The Misfit as a result of he can’t see what he’s carried out to be punished as he’s been. “Does it appear proper to you, girl,” he asks the pious grandmother, “that one is punished a heap and one other ain’t punished in any respect?” The girl calls to Jesus; the Misfit shoots her within the chest.
I prefer to borrow O’Connor’s time period “Christ-haunted” to explain the music of Ethel Cain, the stage title of Hayden Anhedönia, who is commonly referred to as a pop star, although you wouldn’t know that from her songs. Apart from “American Teenager,” an “anti-patriotism faux pop music” that discovered its solution to Barack Obama’s Better of 2022 playlist, her songs are doomed and dirge-like, preoccupied by destiny. “I’m punished by love,” Cain sings plainly on “Punish,” the primary single from her forthcoming challenge, Perverts, which, at over almost seven minutes, invokes angels and murderers, channeling the piano drone of Ruins-era Grouper and Midwife’s doleful so-described “heaven metallic.”
“Phrases imply nothing anymore,” Cain wrote lately in a Tumblr submit she’s since deleted. The submit recognized a disaster of sincerity, an unwillingness to earnestly have interaction with artwork with out utilizing the language of irony and memes. If sure moments on Preacher’s Daughter appeared to mesmerize the mainstream, “Punish” is Anhedönia embodying her title—an nearly cruelly beautiful phrase for the shortcoming to really feel pleasure, a phrase that appears to spite you for the way good it feels to say.
