Death stalks the seventh studio album by feted US singer-songwriter Perfume Genius, nom de plume of Mike Hadreas – but stealthily, not so you’d recognise its presence at first. Here are 11 tracks that sound very much alive – songs that hum with universal emotion and queer carnality, everyday anxieties and high drama, from an artist whose struggles have formed the basis of a compelling body of work. Glory adds heft to it.
Vivid with guitars, the album’s twin opening tracks bring the peripatetic Hadreas crashing back to indie rock after long spells in art pop, and orchestral and electronic environs. His last album, the dub-inflected Ugly Season (2022), originally accompanied a 2019 dance piece.
In stark contrast, on It’s a Mirror, Hadreas sounds like Elliott Smith fronting REM. (Smith was an early comparison around the time of Perfume Genius’s 2010 debut, Learning.) No Front Teeth, meanwhile, boasts a guest spot from Hadreas’s old friend, the New Zealand shape-shifter Aldous Harding (he assisted on her 2017 album Party), and comes to a series of rousing climaxes where Hadreas gets loud and guitarists kick their effects pedals hard, a tang of the grungy Pacific northwest he once called home.
Glory was intentionally written as a group effort and sounds like it, with Hadreas, now based in LA, and his longtime collaborator and partner, the multi-instrumentalist Alan Wyffels, making room for an ensemble including guitarist Meg Duffy, producer Blake Mills and veteran session man Jim Keltner on drums. The subsequent tracks are quieter than the start, many of them pictures of painterly restraint, but these crack players bring all sorts of dappled chiaroscuro performances – pitter-patter beats and twinkly keys on Clean Heart; Left for Tomorrow’s impressionistic, brushed thrumming; Hanging Out’s Low-gone-jazz menace.
The star of the show remains Hadreas, of course – a writer, now 43, whose recurrent thematic concerns are often familiar to those who have followed his evolution from pained, confessional piano balladeer to the kind of performer who could declare “No family is safe when I sashay!” on 2014’s maximalist outburst Queen. But those recurring motifs are continually refined.
Take unrequited love. Sung in falsetto, Capezio is a standout Perfume Genius vignette: full of yearning; granular with detail. Keen fans will spot it as the likely scene before the seduction on Jason, a track off Hadreas’s 2020 album, Set My Heart on Fire Immediately.
Above strummed guitar and fluttering flutes, the evocative Full On describes a burly, hyper-masculine football player getting injured. “I saw every quarterback crying,” trills Hadreas, delightedly, keen to nurse the wounded, “Laid up on the grass and nodding like a violet.”
The self-immolating side of his psyche turns up on In a Row, an intense cut that wallows in a fantasy in which Hadreas is kidnapped and held in the boot of a car – all the while imagining the material for songs he would get out of his ordeal. He says he began writing this track in a bout of acute depression during the pandemic, imagining a future in which everyone he knew would eventually pass on. (In indie rock terms, the words of the Flaming Lips spring to mind: “Do you realise that everyone you know someday will die?”)
Those are the origins, too, of the gentle Left for Tomorrow, in which Hadreas imagines a time without his mother. The song changed context abruptly after the death of his and Wyffels’ beloved dog, Wanda, from a snake bite; Glory is dedicated to her memory.
The body is, of course, a seriously recurring trope for Perfume Genius: racked with lust, contorted with shame, afflicted by maladies, liberated by dance; “I wear my body like a rotted peach,” he sang on 2014’s My Body. Glory’s closing title track imagines the body as a vessel for the spirit, passing through to parts unknown (“roving stray, guest of body”). British folk outsider Bill Fay, admired by Hadreas for tackling difficult subject matters with grace, is a stated influence; Fay sadly died in February.
Yet for all the sombre maturity often shrouding this record, it’s full of energy and biting nuance. The vigour of Hadreas’s lyrics once again confirms Perfume Genius as a consummate chronicler of 21st-century sensuality. Hanging Out depicts an outdoor tryst like a horror movie; Perfume Genius ambushes you with some of his best writing: “My back is a worn-out limousine,” he husks. “Oh, I see his body loosening, the jaw hangs like circuitry.” The band, meanwhile, answer with humid desire and clanks of foreboding; the lingering outro stuttering like a drill.
