PERFUME GENIUS Announces 'Without You' music video competition New album Set My Heart On Fire Immediately out now

PERFUME GENIUS
Announces ‘Without You’ music video competition
New album Set My Heart On Fire Immediately out now via Matador Records / Rhythmethod

Photo Credit: Camille Vivier

Last week Perfume Genius (Mike Hadreas) released his new album, Set My Heart On Fire Immediately to world-wide critical acclaim. Today he announces the ‘Without You’ video competition. Hadreas is asking his fans to submit music video ideas for the track which is taken from the album. He has written about his inspirations for the song and encourages interested fans to submit a creative treatment for the music video they would like to direct. Three fans will be selected as directors and each will receive up to $1,000 (depending on budget submitted) for the making of their video, and $1,000 to be donated to the charity of their choice.

Videos should be shot indoors or outdoors respecting social distancing guidelines. Each director will have a video chat with Mike to discuss the song and video before getting started.

Submit your treatment with moodboard and budget (up to $1,000) via WeTransfer in the link below by Wednesday, June 3. The directors that Mike selects will be notified Wednesday, June 10. Full terms and guidelines can be found HERE.

Set My Heart On Fire Immediately was produced by GRAMMY-winning producer Blake Mills and features contributions from musicians Jim Keltner, Pino Palladino, Matt Chamberlin and Rob Moose. It was recorded in Los Angeles, where Perfume Genius settled in 2017 with longtime partner and musical collaborator Alan Wyffels. The album explores and subverts concepts of masculinity and traditional roles, and introduces decidedly American musical influences. “I wanted to feel more open, more free and spiritually wild,” says Hadreas, “and I’m in a place now where those feelings are very close– but it can border on being unhinged. I wrote these songs as a way to be more patient, more considered — to pull at all these chaotic threads hovering around me and weave them in to something warm, thoughtful and comforting”

Enter the ‘Without You’ Music Video Competition: https://perfumegenius.org/withoutyou/
Purchase / Stream Set My Heart On Fire Immediately: https://perfumegenius.ffm.to/smhofi

Perfume Genius – ‘Describe’

Perfume Genius – ‘On The Floor’

PRAISE FOR SET MY HEART ON FIRE IMMEDIATELY

“Mike Hadreas’ fifth album glides between sublime melodies and grimy, guttural dissonance, embracing the joys and burdens of the human body and its innumerable, intangible yearnings.” – Pitchfork 9.0 “Best New Music”

“The sturdy structures of pop only go so far in Perfume Genius songs. They provide reassurance that others have found ways to capture similar feelings. But they can’t hold back the immediacy of longing, the all-consuming physical need.” – The New York Times

“It’s an absolute tour de force, a record full of drama and emotion and pleasure and pain. If this is Perfume Genius quest for senation, then his latest is absolutely fizzing with it.” – DIY ?????

“It feels like he’s rewriting musical history in his own image” – The Guardian, Album Of The Week ?????

“There’s a silver thread woven into each of these songs; Hadreas pulls and they move like a single breathing thing, just as bodies do when they’re pressed against each other, then released.” – The Independent ?????

“Set My Heart on Fire Immediately is, as its demanding title suggests, his most confident work yet – a patient and emotionally sagacious record that floats and pummels with a sense of satisfied discovery.” – Exclaim! 9/10

“If the early albums were coming-of-age records, this is Perfume Genius, of age. The music isn’t any one thing. It’s everything, occasionally at once, playing with the ideas of hard and soft, innocence and danger, chaos and control, vastness and intimacy, leather and lace. The characteristic — thrilling — strangeness remains, particularly when Hadreas indulges the deeper registers of his singing voice.” – The New York Times

“a pop-perfect two and a half minutes.” – Rolling Stone on “‘Describe”

“‘Describe’ is Perfume Genius at their finest as Mike Hadreas takes us through a trip of multiple dimensions, unveils a screeching guitar and unleashes a heavy rhythm section on this ‘90s rock-feeling single” – Billboard

AN IMPRESSION OF PERFUME GENIUS’ SET MY HEART ON FIRE IMMEDIATELY
By Ocean Vuong

Can disruption be beautiful? Can it, through new ways of embodying joy and power, become a way of thinking and living in a world burning at the edges? Hearing Perfume Genius, one realizes that the answer is not only yes—but that it arrived years ago, when Mike Hadreas, at age 26, decided to take his life and art in to his own hands, his own mouth. In doing so, he recast what we understand as music into a weather of feeling and thinking, one where the body (queer, healing, troubled, wounded, possible and gorgeous) sings itself into its future. When listening to Perfume Genius, a powerful joy courses through me because I know the context of its arrival—the costs are right there in the lyrics, in the velvet and smoky bass and synth that verge on synesthesia, the scores at times a violet and tender heat in the ear. That the songs are made resonant through the body’s triumph is a truth this album makes palpable. As a queer artist, this truth nourishes me, inspires me anew. This is music to both fight and make love to. To be shattered and whole with. If sound is, after all, a negotiation/disruption of time, then in the soft storm of Set My Heart On Fire Immediately, the future is here. Because it was always here. Welcome home. —Ocean Vuong, author of On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

***Perfume Genius– Set My Heart On Fire Immediately

1. Whole Life
2. Describe
3. Without You
4. Jason
5. Leave
6. On the Floor
7. Your Body Changes Everything
8. Moonbend
9. Just A Touch
10. Nothing At All
11. One More Try
12. Some Dream
13. Borrowed Light

***