From the album Perverts
This is a song about shame that has learned to pray. The speaker doesn't reject the God who condemned them. They quote the hymn straight, they sing toward heaven, and they get told they're forsaken anyway. The devotion and the rejection live in the same breath, which is exactly what makes this a horror song dressed as a church service.
Nearer, my God, to Thee / E'en though it be a cross that raiseth me
The hymn is sung without irony. No distortion, no scare quotes. But 'Nearer My God to Thee' is tied to the sinking of the Titanic, a song sung while going under. The song never says that. It doesn't have to.
Heaven has forsaken the masturbator / No one you know is a good person
The second line tries to universalize the shame, spread it around so no one carries it alone. But the refrain keeps returning to 'the masturbator' specifically. The universalizing doesn't hold. The song names one person and keeps naming them.
Masturbator / Masturbator
No act is described. No body. Just the label, repeated until it sounds like a chant or a diagnosis. The song never depicts anything explicit, only the verdict after the fact. What's missing is any scene of actual sin. Only the sentence exists.
This might be a darkly literal warning, might be a non-sequitur planted to fracture the hymnal logic, I'm not sure which. Either way it lands like a public service announcement read at a funeral. The tonal collision is stranger than anything else in the song.
The chorus claimed universality and the song closed the door on it. Now the outro opens it again. But 'it' has no clear referent. The forsaking, the driving, the shame. All three, none of them. The song ends on a word that refuses to specify what everyone shares.
The song asks to be nearer to a God who has already ruled against it, and it keeps asking. Anhedönia has described the Ethel Cain project as what happens when you don't choose to break the cycle. This speaker isn't breaking anything. They're kneeling toward the source of the shame and calling it prayer.
"Perverts" by Ethel Cain depicts someone unable to stop reaching toward God despite believing they've been rejected, creating a central contradiction where the speaker begs for closeness to something that has already abandoned them. In Scalpel's line-by-line reading, the hymn's plea to draw nearer through suffering clashes with the refrain's insistence that Heaven itself departed, transforming the speaker's condemnation into an act of worship.
"Perverts" by Ethel Cain explores begging to get closer to what rejected you, sin without specifics, condemnation as worship, and recklessness as inevitability. The central thread is begging to get closer to what rejected you: The hymn keeps asking for nearness to a God the refrain says has already left, turning abandonment into the thing she moves toward instead of away from. These themes come from Scalpel's line-by-line analysis of the lyrics.
"Perverts" by Ethel Cain was released on January 8, 2025 on the album "Perverts". Scalpel's analysis covers the full lyrics of the 2025 release.
Scalpel's line-by-line analysis of "Perverts" by Ethel Cain lands here: The song never resolves whether she's been forsaken or whether she's the one doing the forsaking by refusing to stop reaching. The hymn and the condemnation loop into each other until you can't tell which one is the prayer and which one is the punishment.