2025 saw Perfume Genius (Mike Hadreas) release his critically acclaimed album, Glory, which, along with its singles, has landed on numerous best-of 2025 lists including NPR, The New York Times, and Pitchfork and, with his band, tour the world playing to packed – if not sold-out – audiences. Perfume Genius performed ‘It’s A Mirror’ on the Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon (watch that here) and the album’s art earned a GRAMMY® Award nomination for Best Album Cover. Building on that momentum, he recently announced his Duo Tour for Spring 2026 – a more intimate run of shows featuring Hadreas and longtime Perfume Genius collaborator, keyboardist, and co-writer Alan Wyffels.
Hadreas has released Glory (Extended), a digital only extended release of the critically acclaimed album featuring four new tracks including ‘Undercurrent (Clean Heart)’ which is available to stream today HERE. The new edition is out February 27 via Matador.
Hadreas shared his thoughts on the extended version and the new music: “All of “Glory” was born from these home recordings. Most of the songs that made it on the record came together with just piano and vocal, which is a way I hadn’t written since I first started making music. There were some more exploratory songs that didn’t quite fit, but I still consider them a big part of the album’s DNA and am glad to share some of them with you.
“Clean Heart” in the studio went through a lot of incarnations before we landed on the bombastic one that stuck. I still think of it as a little hymn, so it is satisfying to share this piano version.”
Perfume Genius – ‘Undercurrent (Clean Heart)’ (Official Lyric Video)
For Glory Hadreas re-teamed with long-time producer Blake Mills and keyboardist and co-writer Alan Wyffels. Mills was also nominated for a GRAMMY for Producer of the Year, Non Classical for his work on this album and others. The LP explores recurring themes that have shaped his artistic journey – examining the body and its decay, of domesticity and love, and of inescapable history and damage.
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 humour, 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.
ACCLAIM FOR GLORY:
“Glory pushes perversion to its limit (and) deepens Perfume Genius’ longtime partnership with producer Blake Mills, with storming crescendos, flutes that sugar plum dance, and bass that groans like an over-burdened mule.” Pitchfork “The Best 50 Albums of 2025”
“There are few more intimate depictions of such seclusion: as twinged Americana opens upon a self-lacerating performance.” NPR “Best Songs of 2025” for “It’s a Mirror”
“Mike Hadreas embraces the grain of guitars on this sumptuous, ever-escalating single from his latest album as Perfume Genius, ‘Glory,’ confronting a swirling maelstrom of fears with a self-assured swagger.” The New York Times “Best Songs of 2025” for “It’s a Mirror”
“The entire record is a high-wire balancing act, but it never buckles under the weight of its beautiful contradictions.” Entertainment Weekly (The Best Albums of 2025 So Far List)
“Hadreas is one of the best narrators in rock music, a truly underrated wordsmith; pen game strong, as the kids say.” Flood (The Best Albums of 2025 So Far List)
“Glory is bold and tender, moving through flourishes of optimism and fear, and unapologetically overwhelming whatever space it lingers in…(it) might be his most spectacular demonstration yet” Paste Magazine “The 50 Best Albums of 2025”
“‘It’s a Mirror’ has a notably strong melody and a confident performance, which makes for an intriguing contrast with those lyrics.” Rolling Stone
“The chorus of this (‘It’s A Mirror’) builds with beautiful imagery” ELLE
“‘No Front Teeth’ is an extremely cool song… it’s a slow-burn that layers the voices of Hadreas and Aldous Harding, building tension and releasing it in an explosive climax.” Stereogum
“(‘No Front Teeth’ is) an unexpected song for both artists, which is part of what makes it so fun — a feeling magnified by the track’s incredible video, a violent, surreal, orgiastic dream sequence that sets a high bar for any other clips set for release this year.” PAPER
“Glory, the next Perfume Genius album, is shaping up to be glorious indeed.” Uproxx
“The album is tender-hearted and open-ended, loosening into a level of directness that not only feels new for Hadreas, but gives even its heavier subjects a weightless air.” Our Culture “The 100 Best Albums of 2025”
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