“There is no real pleasure in life,” says a man known as The Misfit who has just killed a Christian family in Flannery O'Connor's short story, A good man is hard to find. The man, a famous escaped convict, calls himself The Misfit because he cannot see what he did to deserve the punishment he was. “Does it seem right to you, madam,” she asks the pious grandmother, “that one heap should be punished and the other should not be punished at all?” The woman calls Jesus. the misfit shoots her in the chest.
I like to borrow O'Connor's term “Christ-haunted” to describe the music of Ethel Cain, the stage name of Hayden Anhedönia, who is often called a pop star, though you wouldn't know that from her songs. Except for “American Teenager,” an “unpatriotic fake pop song” that found its way onto Barack Obama's Best of 2022 playlist, her songs are doom and gloom, busy with fate. “I'm punished by love,” Cain plaintively sings on “Punish,” the first single from her upcoming project, Dilatedwhich, at more than seven minutes, invokes angels and murderers, channeling the drone of his piano Ruins-era The sad “Heaven Metal” of Grouper and Midwife's.
“Words mean nothing anymore,” Cain recently wrote in a Tumblr post that has since been deleted. The post detected a crisis of honesty, an unwillingness to engage honestly with art without using the language of irony and memes. If certain moments in Preacher's daughter seemed to mesmerize the mainstream, “Punish” is Anhedönia embodying its name—an almost cruelly beautiful word for the inability to feel pleasure, a word that seems to abuse you for how good it feels to say it.
