“Set My Heart on Fire Immediately” was the title of Perfume Genius’ 2020 studio album, and of course, there’s always the fear of burning out. ‘It’s a Mirror’, the confident lead single from his astounding new album Glory that marked a shift from the diffuse grooves of 2022’s “Ugly Season“, still bows down to the feeling of “a siren, muffled crying/ Breaking me down soft and slow.” But if there is a weariness seeping through the familiarly lush and vibrant tapestry of “Glory” – which reunites Mike Hadreas with producer Blake Mills, while elevating his backing band of Meg Duffy (Hand Habits), Greg Uhlmann, Tim Carr, Jim Keltner, and Pat Kelly – it’s not at the expense of catharsis, freedom, or indeed glory.
The album is tender-hearted and open-ended, loosening into a level of directness that not only feels new for Hadreas, but gives even its heavier subjects a weightless air. “My entire life… it’s fine,” he sings on ‘No Front Teeth’. The affirming going to keeps hanging in the silence.
“Glory” has a pristine surface and a tender, roiling underside. Mike Hadreas’ seventh album is muscular, filled out by his partner in life and songcraft Alan Wyffels and longtime producer Blake Mills alongside the fiercest band Perfume Genius has ever assembled: guitarists Meg Duffy and Greg Uhlmann, drummers Tim Carr and Jim Keltner, and bassist Pat Kelly. These players marshall their power, and Hadreas his macabre imaginings and gallows humour, to humane ends. Perfume Genius pries open a mildewed den full of alienation, longing and desire and lets it bask in the sunlight.
The record’s central conflict, says Hadreas, is the “back and forth between internal and external.” Promoting his string of beloved, increasingly ambitious albums during the past decade and a half—touring the world, dwelling in the public eye—clashed with his innate impulse toward isolation. For Glory, he discovered a new song writing process because he welcomed the dynamics of a group, leaving room in his compositions for his friends to flesh out the arrangements. As Hadreas says: “I’m more engaged with the band and the audience. I’m still on some wild tear, but there’s more access and it’s more collaborative, in a way that makes it better, but also scary—because it feels more vulnerable.
Lyrically, these 11 concise tracks reveal uncanny situations that we can just barely discern, scenes of domesticity and desperation projected through an idiosyncratic, queer prism. Each cut is a character sketch at its core, and Hadreas assembles a whole cast: Dion, Angel, Tate, the familiar Jason we recognize from his eponymous number on 2020’s Set My Heart On Fire Immediately and Hadreas’ last release “Ugly Season“. These figures float through an abstracted landscape even as Perfume Genius pins them down with a novelist’s specificity. The result is mesmerizing and life-affirming, a bonafide singer-songwriter record that’s both the most lyrically deft and musically eloquent statement of his career.”
The Fat Angel Sings 