Perfume Genius (Mike Hadreas) has announced his new album, Glory, coming out March 28th on long-time label home Matador Records. Glory was produced by Blake Mills and marks the 7th studio album in his immaculate body of work. Hadreas has shared the first single, ‘It’s a Mirror,‘ and its companion music video directed by Cody Critchloe. The two artists first collaborated on the music video for Perfume Genius’ groundbreaking ‘Queen,’ and Critchloe has also directed videos for artists such as Robyn, Kyle Minoque, Yeah Yeah Yeah’s, Yves Tumor and more.
Perfume Genius on ‘It’s a Mirror’
“I wake up overwhelmed even when nothing is going on. I spend the rest of the day trying to regulate, which I prefer to do at home alone with my thoughts. But why? They are mostly bad. They also haven’t really changed for decades. I wrote “It’s a Mirror” while stuck in one of these isolating loops, seeing that something different and maybe even beautiful is out there but not quite knowing how to venture out. I have a lot more practice keeping the door closed.”
On his new album Glory, Perfume Genius re-teams with long-time producer Blake Mills and keyboardist and co-writer Alan Wyffels along with an incredible group of musicians who have played previously with Hadreas on the road and in the studio including guitarists Meg Duffy (Hand Habits) and Greg Uhlmann, drummers Tim Carr and Jim Keltner, and bassist Pat Kelly as well as a special appearance from New Zealand singer-songwriter Aldous Harding. After approaching writing as an insular practice for much of his career, in the process of making Glory. Hadreas welcomed more collaboration from the musicians working on the project. The result is a more wiry and driving musical underbed to Hadreas’ stories. The album contains themes that he’s wrestled with artistically throughout his career – themes of the body and its decay, of domesticity and love, and of inescapable history and damage. There is also a return of some of his characters including Jason. But Glory is written from a new vantage point – on the other side of struggle, where one is left to contend with all that has happened but also has to learn to live in a still and uncharted place. An album bio, on Glory, by Daniel Felsenthal, can be found after the tracklist below.
Hadreas, a Seattle native, began his music career in 2008 and released his debut album, Learning, in 2010 via long-time label home Matador. The album immediately captured critics’ attention, with Pitchfork praising its “eviscerating and naked” songs, marked by “heartbreaking sentiments and bruised characterizations delivered in a voice that ranges from an ethereal croon to a slightly cracked warble.” These descriptors became the hallmarks of Perfume Genius – Hadreas’ unique ability to convey emotional vulnerability not only lyrically, but with his impressively nuanced vocals.
In 2012, Perfume Genius released Put Your Back N 2 It, further growing his audience and critical acclaim. His 2014 album, Too Bright, marked a bold evolution in production and confidence. Co-produced by Adrian Utley of Portishead, it featured the standout single ‘Queen,’ which quickly became a queer anthem and powerful statement of identity. Hadreas later performed the track on Late Night with David Letterman.
In 2017, Perfume Genius released the GRAMMY-nominated No Shape, a breakthrough album that expanded his global fan base and brought mainstream recognition to his art. Produced by Blake Mills (Fiona Apple, Alabama Shakes), the record earned high praise, with The New Yorker noting, “The center of his music has always been a defiant delicacy—a ragged, affirmative understanding of despair. No Shape finds him unexpectedly victorious, his body exalted.” During the album’s campaign, Hadreas appeared on multiple late-night shows and graced the cover of The Fader.
In 2020, Hadreas released Set My Heart On Fire Immediately, a critical masterpiece on Matador Records that garnered worldwide acclaim. Produced by GRAMMY winner Blake Mills, the album featured contributions from Phoebe Bridgers, Jim Keltner, Pino Palladino, Matt Chamberlin, Rob Moose, and longtime collaborator Alan Wyffels. It explored and subverted concepts of masculinity and traditional roles, introducing distinctly American musical influences.Hadreas promoted the album with performances on Jimmy Kimmel Live! (‘Jason’), The Late Show with Stephen Colbert (‘Whole Life’), and The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon (‘On The Floor’). He followed with Ugly Season, a project born from his collaboration with choreographer Kate Wallich on The Sun Still Burns Here, a dance piece commissioned by Seattle Theatre Group and Mass MoCA and performed across major cities in 2019. The release included a stunning 30-minute film, Pygmalion’s Ugly Season, created with renowned visual artist Jacolby Satterwhite, blending surreal visuals with Hadreas music.
Mike Hadreas is now based in Los Angeles with his partner in life and music, Alan Wyffels.
Track Listing – Perfume Genius – Glory
- No Front Teeth (feat. Aldous Harding)
- Clean Heart
- Me & Angel
- Left For Tomorrow
- Full On
- Capezio
- Dion
- In a Row
- Hanging Out
- Glory
PERFUME GENIUS
GLORY
By Daniel Felsenthal
Glory has a pristine surface and a tender, roiling underside. Mike Hadreas’ seventh album is muscular, filled out by his partner in life and songcraft Alan Wyffels and longtime producer Blake Mills alongside the fiercest band Perfume Genius has ever assembled: guitarists Meg Duffy and Greg Uhlmann, drummers Tim Carr and Jim Keltner, and bassist Pat Kelly. These players marshall their power, and Hadreas his macabre imaginings and gallows humor, to humane ends. Perfume Genius pries open a mildewed den full of alienation, longing and desire and lets it bask in the sunlight.
The record’s central conflict, says Hadreas, is the “back and forth between internal and external.” Promoting his string of beloved, increasingly ambitious albums during the past decade and a half—touring the world, dwelling in the public eye—clashed with his innate impulse toward isolation. For Glory, he discovered a new songwriting process because he welcomed the dynamics of a group, leaving room in his compositions for his friends to flesh out the arrangements. As Hadreas says: “I’m more engaged with the band and the audience. I’m still on some wild tear, but there’s more access and it’s more collaborative, in a way that makes it better, but also scary—because it feels more vulnerable.”
Lyrically, these 11 concise tracks reveal uncanny situations that we can just barely discern, scenes of domesticity and desperation projected through an idiosyncratic, queer prism. Each cut is a character sketch at its core, and Hadreas assembles a whole cast: Dion, Angel, Tate, the familiar Jason we recognize from his eponymous number on 2020’s Set My Heart On Fire Immediately and Hadreas’ last release Ugly Season. These figures float through an abstracted landscape even as Perfume Genius pins them down with a novelist’s specificity. The result is mesmerizing and life-affirming, a bonafide singer-songwriter record that’s both the most lyrically deft and musically eloquent statement of his career.
This opus, Hadreas says, is his “most directly confessional.” Still, he reveals himself not through openhearted first-person dispatches, but instead coiled vignettes, using characters to examine different forms of intimacy: the romantic union of “Me & Angel,” the boyish roughhousing of “Hanging Out,” the one-sided affection of “Full On,” the delirious, unwieldy friendship of “Capezio.” Hadreas’ knack for comedy, which has made him such a trenchant, entertaining commenter on social media, offers a foil to both the record’s sweetness and its menace—the reference to the dancewear company in the name “Capezio,” for example, shows a singer ready to wink at his audience as easily as he can make them weep.
If Glory is an uncommonly personal record, it’s because it reflects on Hadreas’ own anxieties and those of the world at large: the fears that come with success, and also a tenor of paranoia that pervades the zeitgeist. “What do I get out of being established?” he sings on opener “It’s a Mirror,” “I still run and hide when a man’s at the door.” Home is a sanctum, yet one in which familiar habits and nagging memories hold a dangerous sway. His subjects are either in love with their cages, for example on “In a Row” or they’ve been freed from them by the people they let in—as on the touching, gorgeous “Me & Angel,” the latest in a lineage of songs that Hadreas penned about his fifteen-year romance with Wyffels. Perfume Genius’ airy arrangements and embrace of acoustic space help make Glory feel, at points, like a collection of new standards for gay romantics and old souls adrift in the 21st century.
The record’s settings range from stately, doleful ballads luxurious with celeste, flute and slide to ferocious rockers “It’s a Mirror,” led by dueling guitars, and “No Front Teeth,” which features gossamer vocals from Aldous Harding. This juxtaposition, and the confidence and skill Hadreas and his collaborators bring to their fine-spun, liminal sound, suggests a new and vital way of maturing as a queer singer. Hadreas rebukes gay culture’s tendency to view aging as a tragedy, peering past youth’s debaucherous prerogatives to reveal the possibilities of its aftermath. Glory furthers a concept Hadreas began to explore on the monumental Set My Heart On Fire Immediately, recasting life’s lengthy middle as an era of both wizened reflection and of navigating, with a bit more knowledge, the enduring mysteries of closeness, friendship and sex.
“Now in quiet glory / finding shade,” he sings on the finale. Hadreas chronicles living on your own terms after the clubs have closed, the highs have turned scary, and the scene has moved on. He finds his titular glory in neither burning out nor fading away, but instead becoming a better version of the self—complicated, flawed, hardened by experience, cracked with fears both overwhelming and reasonable, yet ultimately more compassionate than resigned. “There’s a map for the first part,” he says about being young and gay. “There’s books about hustlers and drinking and drugs and going out. And then, after that, there’s not a lot.” Still, Perfume Genius keeps beaming his coordinates from a lifted place miles off of the main thoroughfare, his lessons equally relatable and open-ended. The way that you live now is OK, this brilliant, generous album tells us, and at the same time, the way you’ll learn how to live in the future will be just fine, too.
