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Seattle’s Perfume Genius announces new album & shares single ‘Queen’

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5 mins read

NEW LP TOO BRIGHT

RELEASED SEPTEMBER 19th ON MATADOR RECORDS / RHYTHMETHOD

LISTEN TO NEW SINGLE ‘QUEEN’ NOW: http://po.st/PGQYT

Screenshot 2014-07-16 08.53.20

Over the course of two astonishing albums, Perfume Genius, aka Seattle native Mike Hadreas, 
cemented his place as a singer-songwriter of rare frankness,  creating songs that, while achingly 
emotional, offered empathy and hope, rather than any judgment or handwringing. Sparse, gorgeous 
and with Hadreas’ quavering   vocals often only accompanied by piano, they were uncommonly beautiful 
tales of a life lived on the dark side – scarred, brutalised, yet ultimately, slowly but 
surely reclaimed.
Too Bright, however, is something else altogether. Less self-conscious, and less concerned with
 storytelling and easily-digested melodies, it is a brave,   bold, unpredictably quixotic exploration
 of what Hadreas calls “an underlying rage that has slowly been growing since ten and has just begun 
to bubble up”.   Recorded with Adrian Utley of Portishead and featuring John Parish on several tracks, 
it is a stunning about-face which brings to mind audacious career-shift   albums like Kate Bush’s 
The Dreaming or Scott Walker’s Tilt, records which walk the tightrope between pure songwriting and 
overt experimentation.
The fragile yet defiant “I Decline” opens the album, draped in hushed, languorous beauty, but it 
is an outlier. The next line you hear after that however,    on the following track (and first single) 
“Queen”, are the words “Don’t you know your queen?” boomed out over ominous keyboards. This is not 
so much a genuine    question as a rhetorical one, as Hadreas deconstructs gay panic with relish, 
singing “no family is safe, when I sashay” before the chorus explodes into a    gloriously cacophonous 
symphony of synths and vocals. It is both the most anthemic work Hadreas has done so far but also his 
most perverse, a gleeful kiss off    to what he describes as “faces of blank fear when I walk by…if 
these fucking people want to give me some power – if they see me as some sea witch with penis    
tentacles that are always prodding and poking and seeking to convert the muggles – well, here she comes”.
Similarly, a surreal threat hangs over songs like ‘My Body’ and ‘Grid’, with piercing screams, 
tribal drums and electronic stabs highlighting disturbing    lyrics of self-destruction and temporary 
respite from the darkness. On ‘Fool’ meanwhile, swinging doo-wop rhythms disguise a story of social 
mutiny, with    Hadreas tearing into the stereotype of “a walking, talking candelabra”, and rejecting 
it for something much more volatile and dangerous.
Which is not to say that Hadreas has completely abandoned the shimmering, exquisite piano ballads 
that he is so known for. ‘No Good’ is a heartbreaking   meditation on a difficult life lived on the 
outside but “spent looking in”, while the somber closer ‘All Along’ is a resigned yet firm rebuke to 
acceptance and   reassurance from external forces, preferring instead to find refuge from within. This,
 in fact, is the overarching theme of Too Bright; the connective tissue   joining up these 11 stunning,
 weird and wonderful tracks – the discovery of strength and power where previously Hadreas felt he had 
little. As he himself puts    it, during the making of the album “like I had woken some ancient beast 
which began to rattle and threaten to rise”.
 Listen to “Queen” now: http://po.st/PGQYT

 

Perfume Genius - Too Bright

Too Bright Tracklisting
  1. I Decline
  2. Queen
  3. Fool
  4. No Good
  5. My Body
  6. Don’t Let Them In
  7. Grid
  8. Longpig
  9. I’m a Mother
  10. Too Bright
  11. All Along

Perfume Genius Online:
Website:  http://perfumegenius.net/
 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/perfumegeniusofficial
 Twitter: https://twitter.com/perfumegenius
 Instagram: http://instagram.com/perfumegenius
 Spotify: http://po.st/PGSpotify
Gilford_PerfumeGenius_corr_07
High Resolution Available to Download from Press Photos page
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