For over a decade, Mike Hadreas has laid bare his deepest fears, desires and emotional extremes through his music as Perfume Genius. With unflinching honesty and poetic vulnerability, the Seattle-born, Los Angeles-based artist has alchemized trauma into trembling lo-fi balladry, glittering alt-pop and cracked experimental rock across five increasingly acclaimed albums. As he gears up to release his sixth full-length, Glory, on March 28 via Matador Records, Hadreas reflects on the lifelong urge to “feel something extreme,” facing down the terrifying discomfort of simply existing in the world, and finding beauty in the anticipatory grief woven throughout his latest songs.
Craving Intensity, Skirting Self-Destruction
Hadreas traces his desire to seek out darkness and intensity to his childhood, waiting for a windowless van to whisk him away just for the story. While that yearning manifested in “dark or demoralizing” situations as he got older, Hadreas recognizes his self-destructive tendencies have shifted as he’s matured.
“I still want to watch horror movies. I still want to go somewhere and feel something extreme,” he says. “I’m just not as self destructive … or attention-seeking.”
That tension between craving emotional extremity and managing unhealthy impulses plays out in “In a Row,” a standout from Glory. “Think of all the poems I’ll get out,” the narrator imagines while trapped in a car trunk, a darkly comic jab at the notion of suffering for one’s art.
Confronting a Lifetime of Discomfort
Like previous Perfume Genius albums, Glory gestated during a period of depression and discomfort, as Hadreas promoted 2020’s Set My Heart on Fire Immediately through the isolation of pandemic lockdowns. Without the usual cycle of writing, recording and touring to occupy him, Hadreas found himself drowning in unprocessed emotions that had been dredged up from his dance performance piece The Sun Still Burns Here.
“The last record, I was very like, manic; all that embodying was really wild,” Hadreas says of the “fallout” from his most physically demanding and emotionally naked work to date. “I think it dug up a lot of stuff, a lot of feelings that were wild and fun until I was left alone with them.”
Alone with his thoughts, Hadreas confronted the deep-rooted discomfort and fear that had plagued him since childhood, whether skipping school to avoid facing the consequences of an absence or dreading public speaking. “I was trying to confront a lot of that – like how do I engage, how do I be inside of my relationships, inside of the world, a part of things more, even though I’m scared?”
Interrogating Old Stories and Sexual Dynamics
Hadreas didn’t limit his self-interrogation to social anxiety. One provocative lyric on “Rift on Top” – “Can I get off without reliving history?” – examines the sexual dynamics and fantasies he’s clung to since adolescence.
“I’m sick of it in general, my mode of being. I’m not 15, well and truly – so why do I think this guy is going to be mean to me? I’m different now, everything’s different now, but I still act like it isn’t. I have a story about everything that I made up a long time ago.”
Though he recognizes much of this is human nature, Hadreas strives to unstick himself from outdated narratives and default emotional settings.
“I know I’m saying all this kind of therapy speaky shit, but it’s not about self-improvement – I don’t care about that,” he clarifies. “I don’t want to be better. I just want to have more fun, and be kinder.”
Rewriting the Queer Indie Rock Narrative
As one of the few openly gay men in the indie rock sphere, Hadreas has had his sexuality and expressions of gender nonconformity exhaustively dissected by the media. Though sometimes frustrated by the focus, he acknowledges his music has deliberately engaged with “queerness and gender.”
But as cultural attitudes evolve and a new generation of “really faggy” heartthrobs like The Menendez Brothers‘ Cooper Koch gain attention, Hadreas senses he can “let go” of some of that narrative baggage and help expand the canon of queer stories in music.
Noting that “some of the most gentle, feminine, sweetest men I’ve met have been straight, and some of the most awful, misogynistic, reprehensible men I’ve met have been gay,” Hadreas aims to make the kind of art he needed as a struggling young gay man while adding more colors to a limited palette.
“I certainly was obsessed with reading all the hustler memoirs and stuff – I like things that are disgusting and fucked up, I like things that are bleak, I pretty much only like that,” he admits. But “when I got sober, I went to a gay men’s [AA] meeting, and there were all these older gay men who were being kind to each other and enjoying their lives … I remember it being really beautiful to me, and something I hadn’t seen a lot of”.
Glory in Grief
Much of Glory grapples with the dread and anticipatory grief of loss, a feeling that became tragically real when Hadreas’ beloved dog Wanda was fatally bitten by a snake just months after the album was completed.
“I only wanted to be safe and happy and everything, and then to have that not be true any more, to have her be gone … I was embarrassed by how rocked I was by that,” Hadreas says of losing Wanda. “Where does [love] go after that?”
In hindsight, songs like the Solange-esque dream pop of “Left for Tomorrow” eerily forecasted that devastating heartbreak, meditating on “the idea of losing something that is the keeper of all my love.” But rather than avoid the pain, Hadreas leans into it, accepting the bittersweet beauty of fully loving someone or something, even knowing you will inevitably lose them.
That hard-won embrace of life’s glorious impermanence pulses through every facet of Glory, from its shimmering synth-pop and slurred folk-rock to Hadreas’ most confident and ecstatic vocal performances yet.
“It’s about trying to be as much as I can where I am,” Hadreas says of the album’s underlying philosophy. Whether beautiful or difficult, “You always want it to be just the beautiful things, but they’re all kind of mixed together.”
Perfume Genius may not chase the extreme emotions of his youth with quite the same reckless abandon these days. But in pulling his darkest, most tangled feelings into the light, Hadreas has created his most gloriously alive work yet – and offered an honest, imperfect roadmap for being here now.
