On March 28, Perfume Genius (Mike Hadreas) will release his new album Glory via Matador Records. On it he re-teams with long-time producer Blake Mills and keyboardist and co-writer Alan Wyffels along with an incredible group of musicians. 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. The full album bio by Daniel Felsenthal can be found after the tracklist below.
He has revealed a final single ahead of the album’s release on Friday, ‘Clean Heart,’ a hopeful, swelling track that reflects on the concept that time heals all wounds, punctuated by Mike Hadreas’ defiant & beautiful wordless chorus.
Listen/share ‘Clean Heart’ here and watch the visualizer here:
Perfume Genius has already released two singles to worldwide acclaim. ‘No Front Teeth’ features New Zealand folk singer-songwriter Aldous Harding, with a video directed by Cody Critcheloe—the visionary behind Perfume Genius’ legendary Queen video. He first announced the album with ‘It’s a Mirror,’ which earned Pitchfork’s “Best New Track” distinction. Of the song, Pitchfork wrote: “Hadreas ushers in a muscular and direct sound that feels like a decisive pendular swing back from the diffuse ambiance of 2022’s Ugly Season. Hadreas himself has never sounded sexier or more confident as a frontman, and while this isn’t Perfume Genius’ first foray into twang, It’s a Mirror stakes its claim in a musical tradition that, though it’s always been home to outlaws, can just as often breed a festering myopia.”
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!, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, and The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. 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.
Praise for Perfume Genius
“An eerie, acoustic tune that suddenly erupts into a stomping, psych-rock freak-out, ‘No Front Teeth’ features haunting vocals from the gloriously strange New Zealand singer-songwriter Aldous Harding — who fits right into Perfume Genius’s surreal sonic universe.” – The New York Times
“‘It’s a Mirror’ has a notably strong melody and a confident performance, which makes for an intriguing contrast with those lyrics.” – Rolling Stone
“‘It’s a Mirror’ boasts the emotional and sonic quiet-loud-quiet that Hadreas does so well: brokenness and catharsis married together in a gorgeous, tentative union.” – The FADER
“Stunning” – Billboard on ‘No Front Teeth’
“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
“I’d argue that Perfume Genius is one of the few living artists that is, undoubtedly, an all-time great.” – Paste
“(‘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
“(with)15 years of almost unabashed excellence.. [Mike Hadreas] has never run of out of new things to say and new ways to say it.” – NPR (Most Anticipated Albums of 2025)
“Singles ‘It’s a Mirror’ and ‘No Front Teeth’ barge and thrash straight into your nerve center, reminding us that Hadreas is not only a master of rousing indie-pop and tender synth balladry, but also an alt-rock supremo with a taste for the epic. The rest of the album showcases the full Perfume Genius wardrobe, aiming higher and plunging deeper than any of his prior records.” – Pitchfork (The 50 Most Anticipated Albums of Spring 2025)
Perfume Genius
Glory
Glory Album CoverPre Order today
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.
