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Boston Globe
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
Mike Hadreas of Perfume Genius on what it takes to write with intimacy
After seven acclaimed albums of thorny, electronics-enhanced chamber pop, Hadreas seems to have figured out a system. The music of Perfume Genius (which plays Royale on Thursday) is naked and open even as it can feel inscrutable, with a direct intimacy that can evoke discomfort in listeners who are accustomed to looking away when someone in front of them is feeling strong emotions. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up 'I was just talking with my friend yesterday about [film director] Lars Von Trier and how I can understand that people would be really put off by that kind of sadistic, almost relentless tragedy and intensity of emotion and stuff [in his movies], but I find it really relieving,' Hadreas says. And though he admits to the inscrutability of some of his lyrics, he figures that the confessional nature of what he's singing about still comes through, even if only indirectly: 'I think it'll be an ASMR to the feeling I'm having regardless.' Advertisement It's that tendency to come at intense matters from angles that cause a tingle that naturally gives Perfume Genius songs much of their power. ('They have a familiarity and an alien quality at the same time, which is my favorite thing,' Hadreas says.) Many of the songs on 'Glory,' the new album, explore grief, either in the moment or in the anticipation of it. The singer attributes that to simply getting older. 'Dying doesn't feel real when you're younger. It feels like an idea. And then the older I get, the more it's in my body as something that's for sure going to happen,' he says with a chuckle. He also sees it when he visits his parents. 'Every time I go, they seem older in a way that maybe I wasn't present for or didn't notice before.' But there are other dimensions to the spiraling that Hadreas experiences on 'Glory.' With a chorus that leans into confusion and panic, 'Capezio' recounts a fraught sexual encounter with an unnamed woman and a man named Jason. It's a name that's run like a conceptual thread through Perfume Genius's last few albums, as the subject of 2020's 'Jason,' then popping up again in 2022's 'Hellbent.' Even though they're based on different real people (albeit 'dreamified and fictionalized'), Hadreas says that Jason represents a certain type of man he knows all too well. '[For] 'Capezio,' I had the real name in it, and then everyone's like, 'You can't do that.' I was like, 'Oh, yeah,'' says Hadreas with a laugh. 'It is a stereotypical male energy that isn't very generous and is kind of confusing. Part of that I fetishize or get off on, and part of it is really [that] I don't understand intellectually why I would be attracted to that or be activated by that dynamic.' Advertisement With such heavy subject matter and music, Hadreas needs substantial downtime before he's ready to dive back into writing after the work for the last album and tour is done. ('I feel like I need to empty my brain,' he says. 'I need to have, like, a smooth brain.') But it's not simply a matter of mental health preservation. It's a necessary part of his creative process. 'I tour for a year and a half and it's really overwhelming and amazing, but then I isolate and really go gremlin mode, just binge eat and play video games,' Hadreas says. 'I need to, like, do nothing, or else I'll kind of end up doing what I did before. I need to find out what's there now, which I can't really do if it's based off of the last thing I did.' To that end, Hadreas even embraces the dread fear of the blank page that refuses to be filled. 'Even writer's block is a part of writing to me,' says the man who's afraid to finish things. 'It all feels like the same thing. But then there's a part of it where it all opens up and you find it. I think a lot of that is just [that] there needs to be some grace in it. I need to be zoomed out. I can't have a lot of intentions. I can't think too hard about it.' Advertisement The cover for the new Perfume Genius album, "Glory." Courtesy The same holds true for the cover for 'Glory,' which sees Hadreas photographed in a home recording studio, immaculately lit and splayed out awkwardly on the floor while being watched by two indistinct figures, one sitting in darkness in the corner and one standing next to a pickup truck outside. 'I liked that it had that energy that we're talking about. It looked like I could be dancing. It could be kind of sensual seeming, or I could be sick or in trouble [or] look like I fell, which is funny, but, you know, sad to fall,' Hadreas says with a laugh. He adds of the setting for the shot, 'The house has a lot of energy, but it's still the big window to the outside that's all bright and pretty, but I'm not out there.' PERFUME GENIUS Royale, 279 Tremont St., June 12, at 7 p.m. Tickets $50. Marc Hirsh can be reached at officialmarc@ or on Bluesky @
The Guardian
29-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Perfume Genius: Glory review – full of energy and biting nuance
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.
