Latest news with #PerfumeGenius
Washington Post
7 days ago
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
For indie rocker Perfume Genius, performing is the antidote to isolation
On the eve of his latest North America tour as Perfume Genius, Mike Hadreas is focused, he says, on finding 'the perfect stackable chair.' 'I'm concerned that my chair is too heavy,' the indie rocker explains. 'I want to be able to lift it — and throw it, potentially.' Figuring out the stage choreography — and how the chair fits in — is something Hadreas says he'll workshop throughout his tour, which kicks off in Phoenix on May 30. The 43-year-old singer-songwriter, who came to prominence in 2010 with an emotionally raw debut album, will perform a WorldPride concert at 9:30 Club on June 7. Hadreas is speaking on a video call from his home in Los Angeles, between sips of Diet Coke. He loves the stuff, he says — so much so that the soda was featured in the music video for 'It's a Mirror,' the lead song on his new album, 'Glory.' Hadreas declines to reveal just how many Diet Coke cans he drinks each day. 'But it's a lot,' he says with a smirk. This tour comes about two months after the March release of 'Glory,' Hadreas's seventh studio album as Perfume Genius. The energetic, grungy, guitar-laden album explores themes like isolation and anxiety, death, and the anticipation of grief. Hadreas's earlier music grappled with issues like homophobia and sexual abuse. His latest album is born out of fears that first reared their heads during the covid-19 pandemic. 'Death just feels like something that's going to happen to me. And it didn't used to feel like that,' the Seattle native says. 'It became like an obsession.' The song 'Left for Tomorrow,' for instance, sees Hadreas imagining a life without his mother. The song's themes took on new relevance when his beloved Chihuahua, Wanda, was killed by a snake about six months after the album was completed. But writing about those fears helped, Hadreas says, because it gave him a way to channel his emotions. 'It just becomes like a relief,' he says. 'I feel way more confident and smart when I'm writing than I do just walking around town.' That's also part of the point of the album. Rather than conquering your fears, perhaps it's enough to simply live with them, he says. 'The music is better when it feels risky and you feel a little like you don't have the answers,' he says. 'It's like exposure therapy. Actually saying what you're afraid of, instead of frantically trying to not be afraid.' Though isolation is a central theme of 'Glory,' producing the album itself was more of a collaborative effort than some of Hadreas's previous works, he says. Among the contributors was his longtime partner and instrumentalist Alan Wyffels. And while Hadreas has a tendency to self-isolate, especially when he's writing music, he says he also appreciates that going on tour pushes him to do the opposite. 'It's my job to be more extroverted for a while,' he says. 'Tour is how I'm social. It forces me to be less isolated.' June 7 at 6 p.m. at 9:30 Club, 815 V St. NW. $41.
BBC News
30-03-2025
- Entertainment
- BBC News
In pictures: BBC 6 Music festival takes over Greater Manchester
The BBC 6 Music Festival returned to Greater Manchester this week, attracting thousands to sold-out shows across the city. The event, which was broadcast live on the Radio 6 Music station, featured a line-up of acts from across the UK, as well as abroad, including Ezra Collective, Mogwai and Perfume Genius. The festival kicked off on Wednesday with BBC Introducing, a showcase of local and emerging acts jasmine.4.t, Renee Stormz and Adult DVD. Speaking ahead of the event, Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham said: "Our music scene has always been strong, but right now, there's an incredible amount of new talent coming through, alongside a thriving independent scene." Thursday's line-up featured post punk outfit Fat Dog, named one of BBC 6's Artists of the Year for 2024, who were joined on stage at Victoria Warehouse by surprise guest Jessica Winter for a rendition of Satisfaction by Benny Benassi and The Biz. Jazz quintet Ezra Collective then graced the stage, joined by members of London youth organisation Kinteka Bloco for a performance which celebrated the importance of youth clubs across the UK. Speaking on stage, Femi Koleoso of Ezra Collective said: "If you want to make something last forever, you need to create a legacy."He added: "And the legacy comes from giving it away to other people and the other people we choose to give it to are our youth clubs and schools." On Friday, English Teacher, who won the Mercury prize last year for their debut album This Could Be Texas, were joined on stage by surprise guest Richard Hawley to play Transmission by Joy Division. Of the performance at Victoria Warehouse, Hawley said: "[English Teacher are] from Leeds, I'm from Sheffield and we've played a Manchester classic.""Some people might say sacrilege, but I think it's respectful and honourable." Scottish post-rock band Mogwai then played, including two songs in collaboration with local brass ensemble KNDS Fairey Acid Brass. The final night of the festival saw Seattle art pop act Perfume Genius take to the stage at Victoria Warehouse, the day after the release of his new album Glory. Poet and musician Kae Tempest closed the festival, treating the crowd to never-before-heard material. Tempest told 6 Music's Cerys Matthews earlier this week: "I've been lucky enough to be welcomed by 6 Music since the very it just feels like the perfect place to be starting a new campaign." Listen to the best of BBC Radio Manchester on Sounds and follow BBC Manchester on Facebook, X, and Instagram. You can also send story ideas to
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.
New York Times
21-02-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Tate McRae Dances in and Out of Love, and 10 More New Songs
Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week's most notable new tracks. Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes) and at Apple Music here, and sign up for The Amplifier, a twice-weekly guide to new and old songs. A lack of instantly recognizable, stylistically defining hits — aside from the slinky, irresistible 2023 smash 'Greedy' — has somehow not stopped the 21-year-old singer and dancer Tate McCrae's star from rising over the past few years. She dips into a more promising and vulnerable sound on the moody, pulsating 'Revolving Door,' the latest single from her just-released third album, 'So Close to What.' 'I keep coming back like a revolving door,' she sings on a chorus that thumps like an anxious heartbeat, 'saying I couldn't want you less, but I just want you more.' A McCrae single is still only as good as the choreography in its accompanying music video, and by that measure, it's one of her strongest yet. LINDSAY ZOLADZ Perfume Genius (Mike Hadreas) and Aldous Harding share 'No Front Teeth,' a surreal excursion that seesaws between pretty folk-Baroque pop and noisy, neo-psychedelic rock. Perfume Genius sings about being shattered; Harding answers him with a high, angelic call for 'better days.' The video just adds more layers to the conundrum. JON PARELES On this heartfelt one-off single, Alynda Segarra returns to the gentle folk-rock sound they honed on 'The Past Is Still Alive,' the excellent album they released last year as Hurray for the Riff Raff. 'This is not a scene, it's a pyramid scheme,' they sing, pointing to a larger feeling of social collapse that, as the song progresses, dovetails with personal struggle. 'I don't know who you want me to be,' Segarra sings. 'And I don't know, and that terrifies me.' ZOLADZ The latest blast from the Sleigh Bells album due in April, 'Bunky Becky Birthday Boy,' memorializes Alexis Krauss's dog, who died in 2023. 'Nights are long here without you,' she sings. But the song is manic and upbeat, swerving from electro to power-chorded pop, with eruptions of thrash drumming and tangents of dissonance — mourning by celebrating. PARELES Mamalarky — the singer and guitarist Livvy Bennett and the multi-instrumentalist Michael Hunter — makes musicianly antics sound nonchalant on the duo's new album, 'Hex Key.' Bennett breezes through the self-satisfaction of '#1 Best of All Time,' declaring, 'I always win even when I fall.' Her voice stays casual (and doesn't worry about being a little flat) while the beat hurtles ahead and the chords take unlikely chromatic turns. The biggest boast is making it sound so easy. PARELES The professional fiancés Selena Gomez and Benny Blanco invite a third onto their upcoming collaborative album, 'I Said I Love You First,' with this breathy Gracie Abrams feature. Regardless of the fact that 'Call Me When You Break Up' is a conceptually confusing sentiment for a record that seems to be celebrating the singer Gomez and the producer Blanco's love story, Ariana Grande did it first, and with more attitude. ZOLADZ McKinley Dixon, a rapper from Richmond, Va., is a maximalist who regularly surrounds himself with live musical arrangements and hearty backup singers. In 'Sugar Water,' from an album due in June titled 'Magic, Alive!,' he wishes for and then witnesses the resurrection of a friend. The track deploys a springy, Latin-tinged jazz vamp, riffing horns and fervent vocal harmonies. 'Can't believe that I was finished,' says the returnee. 'No time to waste — let's get back in it.' PARELES The rolling six-beat vamp behind 'It's Okay' rushes and then relaxes, underlining the song's anti-stress message: 'Everything's OK but you gotta feel it,' the rapper and drummer Kassa Overall advises. Emma-Jean Thackray overdubs herself into a one-woman jazz combo — trumpet, bass, keyboards, drums — and backup chorus, then offers her own rapped and sung admonition: 'Don't you worry 'bout a thing.' PARELES Ledisi praises the quiet strength and unheralded sacrifices of Black women in 'Blkwmn,' singing 'Being silent, barely a thank you for all she gave / She smiles, powering through her pain.' Sparse piano chords, a slow-blues structure, hovering orchestral arrangements and the cry within Ledisi's voice all hark back to Nina Simone. But it's a new song, a reminder of labor that continues through generations. PARELES Smerz — the Norwegian duo of Catharina Stoltenberg and Henriette Motzfeldt — has been making largely electronic music for a decade. 'A Thousand Lies' relies instead on the fragile sounds of acoustic instruments: a piano intro and then acoustic guitars. The melody rises above two chords defined by sparse playing and picking, sung as tentatively as the sentiments they express: 'I realized lately that it won't be like this again.' The structure is neat and austere; the emotion is not. PARELES The electronics-loving, improvising guitarist Dustin Wong has a new single, 'Archangel Michael and the Pacific,' from a solo album due in April. It's an ever-evolving track that keeps shifting its downbeats and blurs any demarcation between playing, looping and multitracking. Wong's guitar materializes and melts away amid blipping, clanking, percussive electronics, bubbling with rhythm while keeping any final destination elusive. PARELES
The Guardian
27-01-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Head to Bradford for a full Hockney day
Thanks to Warren Brown (Letters, 22 January) for bringing the Hockney collection at Cartwright Hall to the fore. Why not complete the full Hockney day with a visit to nearby Salts Mill in Saltaire? A truly immersive experience to celebrate Bradford 2025 UK city of MacIntoshBurley in Wharfedale, West Yorkshire Further to Warren Brown's letter, please add David Hockney: Pieced Together at the National Science and Media Museum in Bradford. It features pioneering experiments with film and Hauxwell Crosshills, North Yorkshire Re adverse school reports (Letters, 26 January) my head at Bolton county grammar school referred to me as supplying 'the leading voice of dissent where school rules are concerned'. I think this must have helped me subsequently provide a more balanced approach to discipline as a headmaster myself for 16 BradburyBolton, Greater Manchester I haven't watched the latest series of The Traitors ('Keep it plausible': expert advice on how to lie and not get caught, 24 January). I did, however, watch the first and found it nasty and deeply disturbing. The 'moral' being that deceit is the key to success and honesty is for losers. Truly entertainment for our JonesBristol My word, he's kept his looks, that Michael Hadreas (Perfume Genius: 'I want to feel extremes – but I'm not as self-destructive now', 24 January), but to describe him as 'elven-looking' is pushing it. I'd put him closer to CranstonNorwich I like the idea of American landmarks being renamed after Trump (Letters, 21 January). I'm looking forward to Trump SmithHythe, Hampshire Have an opinion on anything you've read in the Guardian today? Please email us your letter and it will be considered for publication in our letters section.
