Album Review: Glory by Perfume Genius

Magnificently muscular songs make for a glorious album that beguiles and enchants, all while insecurity and vulnerability lurk underneath It’s fascinating to observe just how Mike Hadreas’ music as Perfume Genius has evolved over the last 15 years. When his debut album, Learning, was released in 2010, it was full of fragile piano ballads, while Hadreas seemed racked with anxiety as a performer, barely able to look at the audience. Hadreas’ seventh album, Glory, seems the polar opposite of those days now.

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Mike Hadreas has written about our bodies and how easily they break before. But perhaps never so viscerally - or with as much bombast - as on No Front Teeth, Hadreas making the gap left where familiarity used to be seem as beautiful as what was there before. They're 'broken apart and shining', now sheathed within the fabric of his clothes; there may be no front teeth, but there's still 'a feeling I know'.

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It has no shape, and is neither present nor absent. It constructs, then at one point destructs. Rules on earth bend towards it, always on a mission to violate, appease, defy, deceive it - yet to no avail. Glory, his multifaceted seventh album, is unashamed to be another instance of all of these hopeless endeavours.

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The gigantic co-star of the video was gay porn star Arpad Miklos, who would be found dead by suicide in his New York City apartment only a year after the video was shot. The video has since been posthumously dedicated to his memory, with "Hood" and its visuals remaining striking examples of queer confessional pop music: heartbreaking and addictive without being saccharine or embarrassing. From here on out, Perfume Genius would rise to become the king of queer male ennui and a well-recognized critical darling of indie pop.

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A delicate spritz Let the record show that Mike Hadreas aka Perfume Genius knows how to commit to the bit. Whatever end of the queer joy-rage spectrum he sets his sights on, he hurls his heart into the crossfire, often ushering in a sense of apocalyptic urgency. Dynamic songs like "Queen" off of Too Bright reveal the gay agenda to be outright warfare ("no family is safe/when I shasay") and No Shape's "Slip Away" describes a romantic love so fierce and powerful as to drown out the world from sheer force of will.

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Mike Hadreas has nothing to prove - but maybe that's the point. As Perfume Genius he's gifted us with 15 years of stunning artistry, the kind of soul-baring gravitas that other songwriters can only dream of. A catalogue that has levelled up at every point, 2020 record 'Set My Heart On Fire Immediately' was - even by his lofty standards - an incredible achievement.

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In the fifteen years since Mike Hadreas emerged with his brutally sparse debut 'Learning', Perfume Genius has grown into a sprawling, semi-autobiographical art piece, introducing a series of eponymous characters, spawning a contemporary dance piece and evolving into the ominous orchestral beauty of 'Glory'. This time fully absorbing longtime producer Blake Mills and both romantic and creative partner Alan Wyffels into the fold, the seventh studio album pairs Mike's characteristic darkly poetic lyricism with a rousing instrumental crescendo, pushing and pulling from soft to loud and back again, in keeping with the record's take on introversion and extroversion - a staple of his discomfort in the limelight. Mike's decision to collaborate more heavily births perhaps his most musically expansive record to date, in itself an exercise in allowing the external in.

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With each of his albums as Perfume Genius, Mike Hadreas shakes out his pent-up desires--to love, to express queerness, or simply to dance. On his seventh studio album, Glory, he dials back the climactic pop of 2017's No Shape and 2020's sprawling Set My Heart on Fire Immediately in favor of subtler compositions that lurch and wobble over layers of alt-rock and orchestral instrumentation. From this ornate environment, Hadreas delivers tactile poetry and pained self-examinations, extracting catharsis from isolation and anxiety.

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