Amber Waves

Ethel Cain’s new EP Perverts was a difficult listen for me. That is, until I sat in the snowy darkness and allowed myself to feel what the album is emotionally meant to evoke. Discomfort, longing, shame, and finally catharsis. The majority of the songs on the project are ones I will never listen to again, and I’m okay with that. The droning sounds and whispers of poems are things I never wish to hear again, but it may be because it reminds me of the space in my own head a little too much.

But Amber Waves is one that I’ve played over and over and over again. I saw Ethel Cain perform this song at her concert in Los Angeles over the summer, and I was so underwhelmed. I wanted more of the gut-wrenching and provocative lyrics that had been so present in Preacher’s Daughter, but as I listened I could barely make out what she was saying and understand what the song meant. In the moment, the disappointment I’d felt that one of my favorite artists wasn’t catering towards the things I wanted to hear weighed on my mind. In the sea of artists pandering towards their fans, chasing that commercial success to try to solidify a cult around them and their art, Ethel Cain stands as a bastion of artistic authenticity, even if her tastes make me uncomfortable.

And I think that theme of discomfort is exactly why I found her music so compelling in the first place. I was such a sucker for short, electronic hyperpop beats when I found Ethel Cain, and at first I didn’t like her. She was too slow, too different, too pretentious, whereas my own tastes were meant for the life of the young gay socialite I was trying so hard to be. I’d masked myself in a facade of vapidity, at the time unable to identify why I felt so against the idea of authenticity. I’d gone to one of Cain’s concerts in LA with friends, and I didn’t know a single song besides American Teenager. A few months later, I sat down one day in my backyard at home in Virginia, laying out on the grass as the sun sank into the hot summer night, and for once I said I would be patient and listen to this artist who my friends raved about.

It was Ethel Cain that taught me the reward for patience that evening. Every single song more haunting and beautiful than the one before, and lyrically more complex than any other songs I’d heard in my short life. I used to never pay attention to lyrics, because I loved the way the bass and beat made me feel like dancing. Slow songs were not in my repertoire for anything - and most of the music I listened to were songs that I could play at the gym or at a club. But Ethel Cain broke my music taste that night. I don’t think she’ll be doing it again with this new EP, but for so many other fans she absolutely will.

But back to the matter at hand - Amber Waves is about drug addiction at its core. I’ve never been addicted to anything besides a vape, but for some reason this song really spoke to me. Giving up someone you love in favor of what is destroying you. It’s so hard to break an addiction, even when you have the help and support of someone to keep you accountable. But when that person leaves because you’ve gone too far, you’re left all alone, your only solace found in the pills that got you into this mess in the first place, and you have to keep taking more and more just to feel something. Until eventually you feel nothing at all.

I know in some of her comments about the song and the EP Ethel Cain has categorized this state of constant high and chase of euphoria as a purgatorial state, in line with her inspiration for the EP being the Divine Theater, or the holy sense of oneself and the closeness to God. Amber Waves epitomizes the inability to ever reach that God-state again once you’ve achieved it, and the constant hunger for that euphoria at the cost of everything you hold dear is so haunting. The guitar riffs in the background are what really rounds out the lyrics - these so-called “amber waves” of sound that feel almost like a heartbeat; slower and slower they beat, evidence of life until the final line hits - “I can’t feel anything.”

But the lines that most resonated with me in this song were

And pretend at the chain link that I am the wood
As I'm leaning my head back
Saying "Take me, I ain't gonna scream"

I used to go on mission trips to Southern Virginia where I would work on home renovation projects with my church youth group, and two of the biggest things we’d work on were replacing roofs and clearing out brush from overgrown yards. The latter is where I saw and removed countless pieces of trees and wood from chain link fences, where the tree would grow around the foreign object and swallow it whole. I would always think about how the tree must feel the pain of the metal squeezing it in, but these lyrics changed my perspective slightly. The wood willingly goes into the chain link, growing through it instead of allowing itself to be confined. It also evokes the action of taking a pill - leaning the head back and allowing oneself to succumb to the drug-induced haze. The way I interpreted these lines were that the narrator likens the chain link to the rigidity and structure of normal life - pretending one is the wood at the chain link means to be entwined with society, growing through it. But instead, the narrator takes the pill and numbs the pain and growth that may come with returning to society, preferring, as mentioned above, to chase that euphoria they once felt in the Divine Theater.

The name of the song being Amber Waves takes on multiple meanings in this song. Not only does it characterize the loved one who leaves named Amber, but it also represents the sensations of drug use - amber waves of pleasure and pain. The third, and perhaps best known reference although it is not alluded to in the lyrics directly, is the song America the Beautiful, a song I’m sure we’ve all heard at some point in our lives as a secondary national anthem. The song’s first verse goes like this:

O beautiful for spacious skies,
For amber waves of grain,
For purple mountain majesties
Above the fruited plain!
America! America!
God shed His grace on thee
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea!

Referencing this song evokes that feeling of dark patriotism that Cain has been so talented at using throughout her discography. While it’s clear she’s trying to set this world-building in the United States, I personally believe that the use of these lyrics and song title are referencing the opioid crisis in America. It has ravaged so many rural communities across the country and has been tied back to big Pharma companies pushing these drugs through lobbying and pharmaceutical sales. While she didn’t know it at the time of writing this song, we’re having a nationwide healthcare reckoning in our country due to the assassination of the United Healthcare CEO by Luigi Mangione, and Cain has defended his actions and called for more CEOs to be scared for their lives in the midst of a rise in class consciousness. Amber Waves is an ode to the damage that we do to ourselves by engaging in addiction and drug, desperately trying to escape everyday life, but it harkens back to the real culprits of this rise in drug use.

I’m still a bit of an amateur at deciphering the meaning of lyrics, but I credit a lot of my growth to Ethel Cain and her writing. I’m not meant to be the audience for Pulldrone or Onanist or Thatorchia, but when I can connect my own experiences and observations of the world to lyrics and a song, it resonates with me more than any other time I listen to music. I may need some time to understand this EP, just as I did with Preacher’s Daughter, but I’m so grateful for the unabashed uniqueness and artistry of Ethel Cain.