No one can articulate the ephemeral light of loving, breathing, losing and dreaming quite as completely as Mike Hadreas, who has made music under the name Perfume Genius for 12 years, building out one of the most delicate and haunting catalogs of the 21st century. And while Hadreas’ sonic ambitions seem to multiply with each new project he works on, even the quiet, lo-fi piano vignettes that comprised 2012’s Put Your Back N 2 It made clear just how elegantly Perfume Genius could balance a flame on a razor’s edge; 2014’s Too Bright cranked up the fidelity and found adventure in both form and texture, weaving a cathartic, weighted blanket; 2017’s No Shape scattered color abundantly across bursts of emotion, drums and synthesizers. Listening to Perfume Genius feels like reaching out for the arms of lost lovers, basking in the warmth of an embrace haunted by absence. Hadreas’ unique, gentle vocal cuts through any bells and whistles; you can’t help but marvel at the grace with which his touch fills up every room he’s in.
His most recent project, 2022’s Ugly Season, was a wildly abstract and experimental record, written for his ballet with Kate Wallich and mostly conceived prior to 2020’s Set My Heart On Fire Immediately, a more direct—yet nonetheless masterful—collection of songs that pushed the limits of what Perfume Genius could be. Whether the next body of work would continue to stack, unravel or abandon Hadreas’ most recent building blocks was anyone’s guess, but the ever-expanding force of his live band was undeniable. Through Wall of Sound levels of distortion and density, Greg Uhlmann and Meg Duffy’s guitar parts have taken the Perfume Genius live show to new heights post-COVID. Now, with producer and instrumental virtuoso Blake Mills present, guitars take on a voice of their own on Glory.
It doesn’t take long for those six strings to ring out, as opener “It’s a Mirror” kicks off with a crunchy riff and grows into a linear, R.E.M.-coded head-banger. While Mills has been sprinkling instrumentation across the Perfume Genius cannon since No Shape, the twangier shades only surfaced sporadically on cuts like “Valley” and “Describe,” making the full, crunching embrace kicking off Glory both an inevitable conclusion and an invigorating surprise. When “No Front Teeth” launches into mayhem—an overwhelming plunge into rootsy rock and roll—clanging pianos burst from the seams while drum fills propel an explosive release. It’s a sharp contrast against Aldous Harding’s delicate vocal harmonies, which coalesce into a transcendent moment of peace as she sings, “Better days, let them touch me / Let it take everything that I know.” It’s a hazy remembrance of the past and a prayer for future brightness, a melody aching with burning desire and refracted by barnyard cacophonies.
The chorus of “In a Row” is a steadfast surrender to love. Hadreas sings, “Take me the long way around / Think of all the poems I’ll get out / Choking on my spit, it’s a serious thing.” He beckons being swept off his feet yet accepts the likeliness of a mess. Swirling synthesizers and enveloping harmonies whisk off all withdrawal, and “In a Row”’s release is euphoric, as the verses tense up and parallel Hadreas’ turbulent “flopping in the trunk” and “counting every bump.”
Glory is bold and tender, moving through flourishes of optimism and fear, and unapologetically overwhelming whatever space it lingers in. While there is always a longing in Perfume Genius’s music, Glory presents a version of Hadreas that’s more grounded in the pocket of his ever-evolving identity. His music is as immediate as ever, but Glory shines with a fresh and unrelenting gloss. “Capezio” utilizes an uncanny tremolo to reintroduce Jason, a frequent moniker for silhouettes of men in Hadreas’ stories, while “Clean Heart” glistens with a bittersweet sparkle akin to “Nothing At All” from Set My Heart on Fire Immediately. These atmospheres are quite intricate, and there is surely a sea of creativity in collaboration, as musicians who have become integral parts of the Perfume Genius project—Tim Carr, Jim Keltner and Alan Wyffels—contribute immeasurably to the depth in texture and movement of the record, decorating the careful path laid forth by Hadreas.
The front half of Glory is held tightly in motion by the propulsive basslines present in “Clean Heart” and “Left For Tomorrow.” The former looks toward the future with hope, floating in the wind while still seeking ground to stand on. On the chorus, Hadreas sings, “Time it makes a clean heart when you’re miles away from it all / And the dream is gone.” It’s a fantasy of washing away, but the levity doesn’t come without the weight. “Pulled downstream, held from beneath, until the body rebels,” further speaks to rebirth, which Hadreas embodies in the surrendering, yearning chorus. On the other side, “Left For Tomorrow” mourns a future yet to arrive, as Hadreas fears for his mother’s eventual death. The melancholy calls to mind the buzzing, low-end energy of Beth Orton’s “Friday Night,” and its bridge is wounded by an elongated, soul-scraping sax note.
Glory is not light on the ephemeral. “Full On,” the record’s centerpiece, floats over sputtering harps and pleasantly drifts through the breaths of Wyffels’ wistful, merciful flute. It exhales in elegance, illustrating a humorous yet fragile scene where Hadreas witnesses “Every quarterback crying / Laid up on the grass / And nodding like a violet.” Despite its lyrical minimalism, the world Hadreas remembers during “Full On” is vivid, soft and surreal, relying on extended instrumental passages for exposition. “Capezio” and “Hanging Out” are more intangible and impossible not to get lost in. The former is a dizzying maze of flickering lights and funhouse mirrors, with Hadreas’ manipulated falsetto floating over a progression of sweeping synths and transient improvisations. “Capezio” is so spell-binding that one might land upon the heart-wrenching ballad “Dion” without realizing where it came from, hearing a somber call to “let the curtain close” while letting a drift of restrained, mesmerizing scores wash over them. The abstract world of “Hanging Out” swims in restraint, passing through deconstructed, post-industrial stretches, moving like an interpretive dance scattered across a minimal sonic collage.
Hadreas, alongside his band, can vibrantly impress his shape into the most ineffable vacuum, and Glory might be his most spectacular demonstration yet. It’s the shortest Perfume Genius album since Too Bright, but it’s so texturally dense and stylistically ambitious that it should immediately be considered his greatest invention—as it seamlessly updates familiar Perfume Genius concepts with unflinching curiosity, raises the bar of his own excellence and finds beautiful, generous order and renewal in the mess Set My Heart on Fire Immediately left behind. It’s music that takes time to digest, but you’ll be rewarded with the lush, challenging paradoxes of “Clean Heart,” “Full On” and “Hanging Out.” There is no moment that breaks Glory’s spell, only those which allow you to sink deeper into its labyrinth.
Read: “The Everything of Perfume Genius”
David Feigelson is a freelance music writer and producer based in Twentynine Palms, California.
