The title track to Ethel Cain’s fourth EP, Perverts. Titularly released on November 11th, 2024, alongside the rest of the album, ‘Perverts’ suits itself as the first track and opener of the album, choosing to open the EP as a whole with a short, distorted rendition of “Nearer, my God, To Thee,” a Christian hymn dating back to the 19th century written by Sarah Flower Adams, retelling the story of Jacob’s dream or Jacob’s Ladder, a ladder leading to Heaven that was featured in a dream the Biblical Patriarch Jacob had during his flight from his brother, Esau, in the Book of Genesis.
The use of the hymn longing to be closer to God, and then immediately juxtaposed by the constant repetition of the phrase “Heaven has forsaken the masturbator,” sets the stage for the EP’s narrative of the hatred of self-gratification.

A pervert, by common definition, is “a person whose behavior deviates from what is acceptable especially in sexual behavior.” However, in this case, Hayden is likely referring to the other, less commonly known definition of the term, which is “to distort or corrupt the original course, meaning, or state of (something),” or “to lead (someone) away from what is considered natural or acceptable.”

The song is also closed with a quote that Hayden has long teased, and is a signature phrase to the theme of the EP as a whole, ‘It’s happening to everybody.’

On November 24th, 2024, Hayden made a post to her Tumblr and Instagram about the defunct Bruce Mansfield power plant in Shippingport, PA:

One year ago today, I accidentally discovered the defunct Bruce Mansfield plant in Shippingport, PA on a late night drive along the Ohio river while I was living in Coraopolis. Lights on the horizon from the bridge in Monaca led to “smoke” from cooling towers on the other side of the hill until I had followed the backroads all the way to what now sits in my mind as nothing short of a monument to God. I’ve always had a fascination with great brutalist structures, but something about the smokestacks, cooling towers, and other twisted entrails of the power plants of Pennsylvania truly changed the way I see the world and my place in it last year. I spent multiple nights a week parked on the side of the road outside that plant the entire 9 months I lived in Coraopolis; I’d drive up the river in the middle of the night and sit there for hours, admiring the sheer might of the towers and how beautiful and resolute they stood against the grey night sky. They became a beacon of religiosity, of sexual liberation and enjoyment, of contentedness. When I would drive home, I would masturbate in the dark and think about them and only them. I think I miss the power plants more than anything since leaving Pennsylvania. Perverts wouldn’t exist without Bruce Mansfield and neither would the person I am today. Happy 1 year anniversary to me and my giant concrete boyfriend ♡”

In response, she was asked if any of the songs on the album were about the aforementioned powerplant, to which she responded with the following:

the title track :) one of the other “perverts” from the original concept of the EP (along w punish and amber waves) was a man who was psychosexually attracted to power plants and the title track of the EP was his song.”

This refers to the way ‘Perverts’ was orginally intended to be a concept album, where Hayden “would have explored a different character that society considers a pervert on each song”.