Preacher's Daughter, the 2022 album that made Ethel Cain's name, is a concept record about a fictional family — trauma, domestic violence, substance abuse, poverty — filtered through the specific vocabulary of growing up as a preacher's kid in the South, which isn't invented biography so much as adjacent to it: Hayden Silas Anhedönia, the Tallahassee-born singer-songwriter behind the project, is herself the daughter of a deacon.
She'd already put out two earlier EPs, Golden Age and Inbred, following her 2019 debut Carpet Bed, before Preacher's Daughter arrived — all self-released through her own label, Daughters of Cain, without a major label shaping any of it.
Perverts, the 2025 follow-up, throws out most of what made Preacher's Daughter accessible — it's a full drone and dark ambient record, self-released again, distributed through AWAL rather than a label pushing for radio play. Going stranger right after a breakout, instead of chasing the same audience twice, is not the normal move, and it's the clearest evidence yet that the narrative songwriting was never the only thing she was interested in.